Bandwidth gone through roof

[mr_nabo]

Hi,

Just trying to figure out why the bandwidth on a WP site has gone through the roof considering we haven't done any marketing or uploaded any big files as far as I know.

It's gone from 1.31gb in Feb to 14.75gb in March, so I'm wondering what the next steps would be? Could it be spam referral or hotlinking? How do I discover why it's risen so fast?

Thanks,

mn

[topr8]

you need to look at your log files as a starting point, do you have access to them through your host?

[mr_nabo]

Hi,

Looking at the 23rd March logs, I can see Demonoid referenced a lot - seems someone is using one of the avatars on the site in their profile. Could that be the cause, or would that be quite minimal?

I'm on cPanel, so presumably can see more info?

Thanks

[topr8]

i don't know about cPanel i'm afraid.

but doing the maths, hot linking can be an issue.

say an avatar is 50k, then 20 calls is a Meg
20,000 is a Gig.

although seems a lot of page calls to me to get to 13.4 gigs

maybe you want to see if traffic spiked one day for some reason.
do you have a stats package included with your hosting?

[pageoneresults]

Say an avatar is 50k

I've seen Avatars get really big, file size wise. I've even seen it happen on Twitter every now and then. People will upload images that are huge to begin with. Then, due to some oddball dimensions, the image optimization routine gets whacked and you end up with a 50x50 "forced" size avatar that is actually 1024x768 and weighs in at 300k+. Those types of hotlinks will definitely wreak havoc on your bandwidth consumption.

[mr_nabo]

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to try blocking the hotlinking with htaccess and see where that gets me - cpanel nor looking at the raw logs shows me more than a days activity at once (is that normal?)

Thanks

[creeking]

usually cpanel includes a stats feature or two.

see if there is a button for awstats or webalizer. both should have multi-day traffic results.

also, see if cpanel has a hotling feature where it can (easily) be turned off.

[Hoople]

Webalizer will give you an ordered list by bandwidth. Recompress the avatar, add a line in .htaccess to redirect external requests to an off-site image and repeat. Stop when you get below a size that has bandwidth usage similar to the remaining ones.

[mr_nabo]

Thanks Hoople - it was a hotlinking problem it seems, so the htaccess trick to an offsite image worked.

Thanks