Huge bandwidth jump

dw1973 · Feb 17, 2009

Hope someone can help me here.

A website I made for a local business gets around 20-30 hits a day and has been using around 2gig of b/w per month for Nove/Dec/Jan as it's pretty image intensive.

However, over the last 2 weeks, bandwidth usage has gone mad, peaking at 2gig a day but averaging 1.5gig but with no increase in visitor numbers. There's been no changes to the site in this time. Currently this month it's used 17gig!

I suspect that someone is linking to the images from the site so I've added a .htaccess file to prevent this.

But is there anyway I can find out if images have been linked and any other actions I can take?

Thanks

Admin · Feb 17, 2009

Check your webstats!

In doing this on occassion I have found someone has hacked into a site, but rather than deface my site, they add their own scripts and webpages for spamming / phishing.

If you dont have a webstats program, use Google analytics.

FTP into your site and sort the directories by date, check for any recently added that you don't recognise and see if there are loads of HTML pages added.

Your web stats should also show you by IP address anything that is sucking bandwidth. Do a lookup on that IP and find out if it is a serach engine crawler or something else.

If you aren't sure on all this, give me temporary access to your site and I will check it out for you.

Admin

DaveH · Feb 17, 2009

Check lechers haven't hacked the site. Not so common now, but peopled use to share large files on exploited websites.

dw1973 · Feb 17, 2009

There's defintely nothing there that shouldn't be there but 13gig of b/w is going to the US.

However, when looking at the webstats it gives me the top 25 hosts but then lists Others = 17gig and I can't find out how to drilldown into these. My server is using awstats.

I have found one forum which was linking to an image but that is blocked now via .htaccess.

Should I be adding an ignore to my robots.txt for google?

Skinner · Feb 17, 2009

Could your host be counting email, ftp etc ?

You could be being tagetted by his competition, an old school hack was to start an infinate loop downloading all the images on a site over and over to take down a site. The visitor number of uniques stays the same, so does the repeats as they *used* to track pages served not images, its only when you looked what % of the site was downloaded in images that you would notice millions of loads.

Have you looked at the file types downloaded ?

Admin · Feb 18, 2009

Add Google analytics to your site to help you track it down with other stats, it's free and only requires you to add a bit of code to your homepage.

Alternatively try : StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

dw1973 · Feb 18, 2009

Thanks for the help...

Skinner said:
... its only when you looked what % of the site was downloaded in images that you would notice millions of loads.

Have you looked at the file types downloaded ?

Yes, and the majority IS images....83% of hits and 94% of bandwidth, but as it's a tattoo site the images are obviously important so I'd expect this to be high but this accounts for 16gig which is crazy...the biggest file is ~230K so this is the equivalent of 10,000 downloads a day!

admin said:
Add Google analytics to your site to help you track it down with other stats, it's free and only requires you to add a bit of code to your homepage.

Alternatively try : StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

I have statcounter installed but realised I only have it on the index page so I'm including it on the other pages now.

Since I added the .htaccess yesterday it seems to have calmed down a little but I've noticed a few hits coming in via google images. How does this work? Does google cache a version of your image or use your b/w?

Jeewhizz · Feb 18, 2009

Stat Counter won't detect if people are hotlinking your images...

You really need to look at your site logs as provided by your host.

Skinner · Feb 18, 2009

Poo situation...

You either accept people will want to show your flash (art for people who don't do ink) off and allow hot linking or you simply block hotlinking full stop.

If you look in awestats down near the bottom is a section called

"Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines) - Full list"

Click on Full List that will show you what sites are loading 1000s of images but no pages (pretty much hotlinkers).

You may find your hosting someone elses website for them as they are just hotlinking all your flash.

dw1973 · Feb 18, 2009

Hmmm...since I added the statcounter code to all pages, the visitors for today has jumped from 4 to 49 in just over an hour.

A LOT seem to be coming in via google images, which is nice as people obviously like the tats, but kind of crazy for a small tattoo shop on the outskirts of Bolton to be getting hits from Bombay, Adelaide, Croatia, Germany, Sweden, Slovakia and Romania

I've also cut the quality of the big pictures (with little visible image quality loss) so that should help cut b/w down.

Skinner · Feb 18, 2009

Have you considered GIFs or PNG 8's ?

Flash shouldnt really need PNG24 or JPG kinda quality.

dw1973 · Feb 18, 2009

I did have gifs originally but the client didn't like the quality.

As I wasn't expecting huge traffic on it, the big files weren't an issue until 2 weeks ago :roll:

WeTalkBuiness · Feb 19, 2009

As the admin said your site might got hacked and/or suffers a DoS attack which hackers will throw you endless rubbish to your server and couldn't serve any webpages to your visitors eventually.

dashu1 · Feb 19, 2009

I have a few sites that see a large number of hits from Google Images, it takes google a bit longer to index them, but once it does it seems to be a very common way for people to find a website.

If you try searching for tattoo designs or other search term in google images you'll probaby find that you're appearing on the first page of results now, hence the increase in hits.

If it isn't doing anything for the business you should look in Googles Webmasters tools - I believe that you can unset the website from being included in google images, or you can do it in robots text, or both.

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

People are probably downloading the images & going to their local tatooist in Bombay or wherever - not so good for your customer in Bolton.

dw1973 · Feb 19, 2009

Never thought of google images being a way of getting more traffic but stats have certainly jumped in the past 2 weeks. 800 unique visitors yesterday, 566 so far today.

I saw that in webmaster tools yesterday dashu1 but thanks anyway. The owner likes his extra traffic he's getting so I'm leaving it be for a little while, at least until it uses all my b/w allowance.

Just need to find a way to monetise all those visits now :twisted:

dashu1 · Feb 19, 2009

Why doesn't he put the better quality images in a protected area with a taster image visible & have people pay to download the designs - if that's why they're coming to the site they must be willing to pay a few quid