We normally spend about 4gb of bandwidth a month for our clansite. Now all of the sudden we spend 7GB A DAY! How is this even possible. The whole website including forum is only 24mb big. There are 174 registered members on the forum but obviously they dont all visit our board every day. There are also no spambots or human spammers registered. There are no downloadable files or media. Also there is no stuff linked to other sites like vids or images. Anyone got any ideas?

I don't see how it is possible. If all 174 members visted the site and viewed everything there they would only use 4176mb or 4.07GB per day.

A file size of 4176 megabytes can also be expressed as
35030827008 bits
4378853376 bytes
4276224 kilobytes (abbreviated as KB or Kb*)
4176 megabytes (abbreviated as M or MB)
4.07812 gigabytes (abbreviated as G or GB)

source: http://www.t1shopper.com/cgi-bin/calculate.pl

Check your stats and see where and what is taking the hits.

My old image hosting site used around 22GB per day! What host are you using and did you go over your allowed bandwidth?

The traffic seems to come from the apache server or at least that is what the stats say. The detailed apache stats are just one big textfile. Obviously we went over our BW limit now. Its set to 10gb a month but never had any trouble with that over the past 5 years. Now we are over 20gb already.

Is it possible searchbots like googlebot are sucking that much BW?

7Gb for a clansite - huge traffic.. Imposible...

It doesn't sound very likely to me.

Spiders tend to be quite considerate, and even if each major one downloaded your entire website each day, I couldn't see you using an extra 6.9GB / day from that.

I'd suggest taking a look at the raw Apache logs and checking to see if you have a particular file that's hit far more than the others, and/or strange referrers for image files etc.

If you find either of those things, it's possible that you have someone hotlinking to some image and using it on a very popular site. That's the only feasible explanation I can think of right now.

Have your visits/hits etc. increased significantly over this period too - or is it just bandwidth usage?

Have you asked your hosting provider to help identify what has caused the increase in data transfer usage?

Thx for the replys. Iv taken a look on the apache logs but thats just a huge textfile. I also monitored the BW usage very closely. Every 5 minutes or so i checked the meter and nothing hapened. The all of the sudden it jumped up with almost 2GB in 5minutes, very strange. Our host isnt very helpfull either. Basically the only answer i get from him is that we must be ruuning a corrupt script or something. The only thing running on our website is a phpbb board (latest version), a news script called cutenews which doesnt use any mysql database and a wee contactform.

Futhermore our site was down comlpletely on the 11th of march. Yet, that day weve spend 3.08GB traffic while the site was down. I dont get it..

Originally Posted by Spuddy0108

Futhermore our site was down comlpletely on the 11th of march. Yet, that day weve spend 3.08GB traffic while the site was down. I dont get it..

When you say it was down - was the server offline or was it something else (e.g. forum disabled etc.).

I'm wondering if it's possible that someone was still downloading images from your webspace or something like that?

Try running your logs through one of these:

• http://www.weblogexpert.com/
• http://www.abacre.com/ala/
• http://www.hping.org/visitors/
• http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmas...nalyzers.shtml

It certainly sounds like your host is basically lying - but take a look at the above and see what you find...

Which control panel software is reporting/monitoring the data transfer usage?

When i say the site was down i ment the site was completely down due to BW overusage. It went down on the 10th in the afternoon and back online on the 12th in the afternoon. So on the 11th it wasnt up at all, yet 3.08gb was spend.

Im gonna check the links you gave me now. Thanks for that.

the controlpanel is Directadmin v1.29.3

That sounds like either a corrupt script (one that redirects in an endless loop or one that does a large data dump comes to mind) or a bot.

Have you compiled your logs into stats and checked for IPs that consume large amounts of bandwidth or pages that do the same?

It could be possible that your host control panel "mis-calculate" your bw usage. I had such problems with several clients. They were over-using their alocated data but afterall they weren't, plesk was "screwing" things up.

Anyway you can bring this up to your host so they can deeply analize your case.

Thanks for all the replys. The problem has been found. Raulica you were right, the control panel was screwing things up. Our webhost finally admitted.

Thank you!

You may be interested in this:

Originally Posted by http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=98872

My ISP told me today that DirectAdmin 1.29.3 has a problem counting the correct bandwidth and he upgraded to 1.29.4 (released today) trying to fix it.

Looks like a recent bug in DA, so not something your host was directly responsible for (e.g. not some sort of config. error).

Raulicã, I'd be interested to know which version of Plesk you suffered a similiar issue with? I don't recall having that issue ourselves on our own servers.

Sorry for this delayed answer, I had such problems on Plesk 7.5.3 & 7.5.4 on FreeBSD 5.4.

Hmm... ok. Wonder how we avoided that? Was it specific to FreeBSD?

good tht yo9ur problem has now been solved...
cheers

Originally Posted by damien_ls

Hmm... ok. Wonder how we avoided that? Was it specific to FreeBSD?

I do not know, but I used FreeBSD 5.4 and I had that problem. I had to download all updates from SwSoft to finally get rid of this problem. And the weird thing was that not all accounts were affected by this issue.