The last 2 days my site is experiencing some strange things in the stats.

Number of visits is staying (on average) the same but page views, hits and bandwidth-usage is almost 50% bigger.

Since I had my site "stolen" once before, hotlinking is now blocked, and thats why this sudden increase surprises me.

In my eyes this can mean 2 things:
1. My site suddenly makes the visitors browse more pages (which seems unlikely to me, since we had stable statistics for over a month)
2. Someone found a way to by-pass the hotlinking.

I checked also in the stats if any strange sites appear in the external links from other pages, but there is nothing suspicious there.

Can someone give me advise on this matter, is there a way to by-pass hotlinking??....or if its just a sudden boost of browsers on my site??

thanks

I'm not sure about your case, but often the number of visitors double, when search engine bots visit your site. What has your host told you about log files?

Maybe it was DDOS?

how would i know if it's a DDOS? i mean i cannot know if someone is trying to attack the server and put it offline..

Jeyce, i how can i pull the report from my server? anything offered in cPanel or i have to contact the host company? (i use hostgator)