Awstats/plesk Vs Rackspace Bandwidth

[yaashul]

I have encountered a very strange issue. According to website logs(awstats) my bandwidth usage is around 15gb per day. Same is reported by plesk as well. But Rackspace portal showing 42GB per day average consumption.

I talked to them and they said rest of the bandwidth is network overheads and are no giving any breakup of bandwidth usage. Now around 27gb per day as network overheads is way too much for anyone.

Can one suggest me something related to this issue.

[phranque]

are you backing up your content on another server?

are you or others uploading content via ftp or other non-web protocols?

your host is probably reporting all bandwidth in and bandwidth out.

plesk and awstats are probably only reporting http(s) traffic.

[yaashul]

we do not take backup on another server. We use ftp but hardly 100 mb per day. Yeah Incoming connection are around 1.5 gb

[lammert]

Awstats and Plesk counts are based on information from your webserver which counts the size of the data only. This does not take into account the overhead bytes in each packet header, but these bytes are counted by your webhost.

Furthermore there is incoming traffic which you should take into account. These are not only the http requests coming from client computers, but also acknowledgment packets on the lower TCP/IP levels which are not counted by your server side stats packages.

And then there is traffic other than the regular http traffic. Phranque already mentioned backup traffic, but there is also traffic of other protocols like DNS name resolve requests, SMTP traffic if you have email software enabled, and all kind of traffic of hackers, spammers, port scanners, who probe your servers without you being aware of.