Bandwidth

Let's Chat
1

I’m using a lot of bandwidth and my host suggested that I ask you guys how much do you use and also do you turn spiders off?
I’m using “alternative dashboard” and have used 32% of my 20gb in less than two days!!

thanks

2

Have you check your site logs to make sure nothing weird is in there?

3

Yes checked logs and apart from bots all appears normal
Thanks for the comment

4

6.4 gigs in < 2 days 8O How many hits did your site get?

5

Your home page takes about 237Kb to load once… biggest contributor is the banner image at 87Kb.
The stock V2 template takes 105Kb and the V3 template takes about 104Kb to load the index page.
The AJAX fetch of clientraw takes about 1Kb, so can add up if you have lots of folks who camp on your page… have you set a refresh time limit in the script? I had to do that when my hoster said I had excessive bandwidth.

I suggest you look at your logs for large file downloads.

6

I noticed the big 'n slow banner. By my arithmetic it would take 25,000 loads of the main page to equal 6 gigs. That would be 500 loads an hour for 50 hours.

7

No robots.txt so you are not attempting to control the spiders… Some of which can eat a lot of bandwidth for questionable returns.

By default (weather sites), I use something like:

User-agent: searchpreview
Disallow: /

User-agent: baiduspider
Disallow: /

User-agent: HttpDownload/2.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: Yandex
Disallow: /

To really know what is happening, you have to look at your logs… as those tell the story of who is hitting what, how often and how much.

BTW, if you don’t have robots.txt, chances are you have not setup a sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools and most likely are not using Google Analytics which would also give you a place to see who is doing what…

I’d recommend setting up both to help provide you an idea of whats up.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/

8

I am with the same host as you Goldseeker. Have you looked at the stats via Awstats which is in your hosting control panel? It will show you a breakdown of useage both by IP and file request.

My bandwidth for the month - with three sites is 366.37 MB up to 08:52 hrs (GMT+1) 3/4/11

9

Thanks everyone for you comments and suggestions.
Trying to implement some of them as I can find nothing unusual in my logs.