Bandwidth theft?

[richardevanslee]

This afternoon trying to go to my website I saw a message saying my 25 Gig of bandwidth has been exceeded. I've never had that kind of useage. What I can see in AWStats is about 1.5 Gig. My referral logs haven't been heavy. FTP usage light.

I'm assuming that in someway my bandwidth has been used by others. How do I determin who and what can I do about it?

[Connie]

richardevanslee

Hopefully you have submitted a support ticket on this issue. If
not you should. Occasionally you will get help from Jag support
when posting in the forums. To be sure you get the help you need submitt a support ticket.

[richardevanslee]

I did but wasn't sure what if anything they would be able to do for me about something like this.

[stevenha]

Richard, can you give us an update about what ultimately happened?

[richardevanslee]

Blocking people from displaying images residing on my site seems to have eliminated the problem. I have a very few, highly optimized pictures. That over 30 Gig of bandwidth could've been consumed still startles me.

I am a little disappointed that customer service never answered a couple of my questions about blocking certain referrers.

[Defender]

30gigs from pictures? Wow.
How large is each picture?

[richardevanslee]

57 pictures, none of which is larger than 42 K. I'm really kind of skeptical that could've been the only cause. But blocking them has at least coincided with my bandwidth usage dropping back to what'll probably be about 6 Gig for the month.

I was also getting a huge number of bogus referrals from subdomains at reallyconfused.com - a host of porn sites. I can't imagine what purpose the bogus referrals could've served. Aside from the porn sites I'd find false referrals from a roofing company and other vanilla business sites. Had me completely baffled.

[bubby]

i've also noticed our bandwidht getting chewed up on certain days. running nuke, i noticed also that at these times, i had something like triple the amount of guests on the site as normal.

checking the stats of current visitors, the culprit turned out to be crawlers and bots, googlebot and alltheweb crawler in particular.

our site was indexed to the hilt, but certainly ran it into the ground doing so.

[richardevanslee]

My site is mostly static, just a few php includes.

[Ducklake]

I see your site is still down.
Have you had any response from tech support.
I can't believe all you bandwidth was used on pictures, or visitor's, that's crazy.

[richardevanslee]

Webalizer show a couple of companies with blocks of IP addresses consuming most of my bandwidth. Doing a WhoIs didn't reveal much about them except that they don't have active websites.

I can't help but wonder what they were doing and why.

I've modified my .htaccess file to block them and used

http://diveintomark.org/archives/200...o_to_hell.html

to block a number of bandwidth wasting clients.

I've ordered extra bandwidth so I can see how effective what I've done is but have to wait until Monday when the sales folks arrive. Hate having my site down for so long a time.

[Ducklake]

That's Crazy, that'd really suck for somebody like me who doesn't know all that stuff.
I'd be mad as hell if my site was down for that long, even though it's for my hobbies.

So does that mean alot of people were hot linking your pic's?

[richardevanslee]

I don't think the few small images that I have mattered. And the bandwidth drain continued after I blocked hot-linking.

I don't know if someone was duplicating my content (I have five weblogs, some of which are updated frequently) or it was just harassment by somebody who was either offended by my site or was just being malicious for the heck of it.