Bewildered at bandwidth usage

I have no idea exactly what is up.

I have the same amount of active users that i have had for the past few months on my IP board and nothing notable has been changing but my bandwidth has been rapidly getting ate up for the month. I usually only would you maybe 10-20% of my monthly allotment.

I recently just switched to a new host...and within less than 24 hours i've already used 1261 MB of my 20,000 MB

Usually at the most i'd do about 300-400 MB a day so this is 3 or 4 times higher and i noticed on my old host , the bandwidth was high as well before switching to the new host.

Any ideas on what i can do because at this rate should things keep going the way they are, unless, i upgrade the package i could very well run out of bandwidth before the month is over.

 

Are you able to track down within your server control panel what object are getting hit the most?

 

I'm betting an image, video, or other large file hosted on your server is being shared all over the interwebs.

 

How would I find this out?

@Brandon Where in CPanel would i find that?

 

Do you have any type of stat tracking options in cpanel?
Check out under logs

 

yeah i have that. Which of them should i check?

 

IDK, the bandwidth one

 

And if people are hotlinking your images, you can set up a 404 or something so the image doesn't show unless its on your site.

 

+1 check out the Hotlink protection area of cPanel too.

 

It says that http usage is the main thing that is using the bandwidth up.
(I clicked on bandwidth in cpanel)

and i dont see an option for hotlink protection.
sigh...i'm such a newb

 

something like this?

 

If you're using cPanel, under logs if webalizer is enabled as a logging program you can see which file is being requested/shared the most.

 

Sorry for all the newb questions

@cpvr @Brandon i saw the hotlinking protection thing so what does it specifically do?

This is what i got from webalizer....not sure what i am looking at that though.

 

No problem on the questions, that's what we're all here for.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking

 

Hotlinking protection is when someone shares an image or a video that is hosted on your site on another site (for instance dragging an image from your forum into another if the editor there supports drag & drop) they get a message stating "hotlinking not allowed" or similar. I.e. your server then rejects requests for images that do not originate on your site.

It seems that both file servings and page servings are in the same order of magnitude and that in sum, a lot of data has been transferred.

You could remedy this by enabling web page compression on your webserver or in your forum software. For instance, web pages can be served as gzip-compressed HTML as opposed to plain-text HTML. This can save a lot of bandwidth.

Also, you could put restrictions on image or video sizes, but try out other options first, like hotlinking protection and web page compression (the latter usually is enough, unless many people share stuff on your forum elsewhere).

 

Click on Aug 2012 and you'll get a greater breakdown. Then at the top of the new page, click urls. You can see the amount of requests for specific files and bandwidth used.

 

awstats or weblazer will give you stats of most downloaded files and from what user-agent

I've seen bots and java bots/spiders running around consuming alot of bandwidth for some clients of mine. Firewall block the offending ips, proper robots.txt setup and some .htaccess blocking by user-agent should help.

 

okay thanks guys working with the host to figure this out ;P

 

What did they say?

 

Actually it was suggested by Charles(IPB president i think) on aex forums, that it may be baidu.
the host is looking into baidu as well as other causes. I haven't checked the ticket yet.