Bandwidth Usage and Abuse
Yesterday I was getting bombarded with emails from my web host telling me my bandwidth was nearing it's limit of 10,000 MB. I felt sure it had to be a mistake because I chose the hosting plan initially thinking I would use no-where near that amount of bandwidth. With my previous hosting provider I stayed under 300 MB per month, so I went to the stats page on my cPanel and saw that since mid October my bandwidth had been gradually increasing. I was convinced that someone was stealing my bandwidth and so I did a very thorough investigation of all the statistics on the site and noticed a few anomalies.
There were images being linked to by other sites, and 3 sites in particular showed they were using huge amounts of my bandwidth. I've since banned those sites. One was called independentgirls.com and looked like a porn site. Another was a forum site that when I went to browse there I got a warning from my spyware program telling me it contained malicious software, and the third was rockband.com. Needless to say I added them to the IP banned sites.
Next I immunized my site against hot-linking. In case you don't know, hot-linking is when you show an image on your website that comes from someone else's website. Actually you're stealing their bandwidth. It's something that many people do without thinking twice and something I'm guilty of doing in the past, before I understood what bandwidth even was.
Today my site has effectively shut down and locked me out. There's and internal server error page saying the web-owner has gone over their bandwidth allowance. I'm still wondering why this great surge of interest in my site. In September I had an average total of 93 daily visitors. By October the figure had risen to an average 630 daily visitors. November is showing the average at 2,800 visitors per day. Daily page hits was 1021 in September (less than the 1057 I had a day in August), but during October the daily average had risen to 14,443 and November is showing the daily hits at 72,998. Now you tell me, am I right in thinking I have a problem here? Surely my site has not grown in popularity to this extent in just 2 months. I could kid myself and think that it has but I'm sure I'd be deluding myself.
This is all rather alarming as well because it's only the 9th of November. There's another 21 days to go!
Needless to say I had to upgrade my hosting account to continue to use my site. Forced into an upgrade! It was only an extra $20 USD to upgrade to an unmetered bandwidth package so I can stop being worried. By tomorrow my site will be back up and I can continue to play on it. Lucky for me I can indulge my need to share on one of my other blogs (ie this blog).
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