The bandwidth on my site has recently exploded.

[NJLawman]

The bandwidth on my site has recently exploded. If I cannot get it back down soon, I will be forced to purchase a more expensive package which I would like to avoid if at all possible.

Previously, my site used about 2 or 3 GB per month. Now it's up to 11 GB.

Any suggestions

[Farix]

Check you logs and see what is taking up most of that bandwidth. [Wish I could be more extensive, but I'm in a real hurry right now]

[PhraSEOlogy]

Make the HTML lean and optimize graphics if you have them. The smaller the page the better.

[yowza]

Make sure there isn't any bot that is going crazy on your site.

[vkaryl]

Bottom line: dig into your logs. Are there graphics which are being hotlinked? That's maybe the #1 culprit....

[danieljean]

If it's just increased popularity, the revenue should cover the bandwidth costs and then some. A lot of hosting companies do gouge though... if it's getting too expensive, shop around and/or just mention that you are considering other options.

[RammsteinNicCage]

Did you add any large files, like video or audio files that people might want to download?

Jennifer

[Farix]

As I was saying before I got pulled away from the computer. Check your logs to see if you can find out what's going on. If you have a log analyzes tool, that will help get an overview of your traffic. Check to see if there is any particular file that is accounting for a significant portion of your bandwidth or if you are receiving a lot of referrals for a particular site.

Then check all the files in your web directories. Are there any new files, particularly large ones, that have recently showed up? Did you added these files or did one of your co-webmasters add them?

About four of months ago, a Star Wars RPG site for which I am a co-webmaster of saw a huge spike in bandwidth usage, roughly 600% half way through the month. After some digging around, I found that an archival image of Galaxy M100 (1200 x 1200 and 282 KB) that we kept was getting a lot of hits recently. Then I checked our top referrals and saw that a space simulation site was using that image as the background for one of their pages.

After the discovery we took down the original images and replaced it with a white on black image that read "F#@$ You <website name>! You Bandwidth Thieves!" Soon after, we stopped receiving any further referrals form their site. Unfortunately, we can't block hotlinking using mod_rewrite because it screws up with the FrontPage extensions on the server that allows most of the co-webmasters access to their respective (sub-)web(s).