Hi,

I have a forum which used less than 500MB bandwidth last month. But from the last day of July, when I check the cpanel, I see over 1GB transfer per day!

Then I closed the most popular forum (which I believe counts half of the traffic and bandwidth usage) for two days, I still didn't see any decrease of the bandwidth usage.

Then I tried to close my who forum for 28 hours, but the next day I checked the bandwidth usage, it's still over 1GB.

Is there a way that the host can cheat the bandwidth usage so we users ended up paying more than we should pay?

Thanks.

Check your logs. Sudden jumps in bandwidth are usually due to a few reasons:

Good Reasons:
Your site got some press.
Your site got in the top ten search results on a search engine.

Bad Ones
You've become a warez dump.
You have a script sending out files that is stuck.
You've been hacked.

Check the logs and try to look for files that are getting accessed. Sometimes people will still image archives by just linking them up. Thus you pay for the bandwidth.

Thanks.

I believe there was no hacking, warez dumping happened. And I don't think there was hotlinking, since I don't understand why people hotlink a forum topic. Actually I checked the webalizer, and it seems almost all the traffic are from my own site.

The question is: Even after I closed the whole forum, I still got 1GB transfer!

Besides the forum, I have less than 50K files.

How could this happen?

your bandwidth wont go back down again below 1gb, it will only go up but slower by closing the forums.

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
your bandwidth wont go back down again below 1gb, it will only go up but slower by closing the forums.

good point as he mention

close my who forum for 28 hours, but the next day I checked the bandwidth usage, it's still over 1GB.

is that increasing every day or else ???

you can ask your host to pass apache logs also ask him to give you ftp logs and check them out. i think this should help.

Originally posted by SplashHost.com
your bandwidth wont go back down again below 1gb, it will only go up but slower by closing the forums.

Don't understand this. Before I close the forum, the bandwidth usage was 14000MB. After I close the forum for 28 hours, my bandwidth usage was 15100MB something.

What do you mean my bandwidth won't go down??? When there's no traffic, there's no bandwidth usage, of course I should see the daily bandwidth usage decresed.

What they're saying is the number you're looking at is probably a tally. It NEVER goes down, until it is reset at the end/beginning of the month.

If this is what you're watching, it will always be going up, just some days may go up faster than others.

I don't understand why it's confusing.

Let me make it clearer:

I have a forum that took less than 500MB transfer per day. After I had been moved to a new server, I got more than 1GB transfer per day.

I closed the forum for 28 hours (besides forum, I have less than 50K files at my website), the next day, the bandwidth usage still went up by 1.2GB. (From 14000MB to 15200MB). I then cloed part of the forum, and I still got 1GB transfer per day.

It seems no matter what the real transfer is, 1GB transfer is added daily.

Of course I know the total monthly usage will not be reduced.

So, is it possible for the host to add the bandwidth usage so that I pay more than what I should pay?

Thanks.

ebird

I believe Cpanel Bandwidth Monitor update once a day. You might want to shut your site down for 48-72 hours. If you still see the bandwidth pumping up. Then something is wrong..

Where/how is your bandwidth being measured?
I assume this is a Cpanel plugin (not familar with cpanel). What logs are being used by this plugin to check for bandwidth? Is it possible that this program is re-running log files for some reason. I have seen this happen before where a mistake in the log files causes the entire log to get re-processed, thus doubling hits, bandwidth, etc.


I also assume that your hosting company has a way to monitor bandwidth independent of your machine. Use their tool or call and ask them your bandwidth usage. Check their numbers as compared to yours.


If their numbers are lower than yours, then your monitoring program is choking on something and giving false reports.

If their numbers are the same/similar to yours, then you must be sending out traffic somehow. You will need to run netstat as well as ps and perhaps lsof to find out where the traffic is comming from. There could be a script hung up, a bot, or other problems.

Keep in mind Cpanel has a nasty problem, there will be one site listed by domain name but will log all traffic on an IP address, so if you have a smart and dishonest hosting client they will access their files via IP address then the directory offset. We had some peopel hosting porn that used over 200gig a month, it took us a few months to catch them.

that's fine but there is always problem tracking down email bandwidth usage for domains. Is there any way to track email bandwidth usages ? :confused:

If you use gzip on your forums, it'll save some transfer space and also speed them up some.

what services are running on the server your site is hosted on?
what services are you paying for?
Is this server with only you on it?

Is the report your are seeing for cumulative monthly bandwith totals? Or, are you seeing a daily transfer rate (which is my take after reading all this.

Is the operating system running on NT/2000 or Unix?

What other services are running on your site besides the forum?

Originally posted by El Nino
If you use gzip on your forums, it'll save some transfer space and also speed them up some.

how gzip can work out through http:// ?

that's silly! It can't... well unless you use a ssi call like:

<!--#exec cmd="/usr/bin/gzip -d /path/to/file.tar.gz"-->

worse has been done. But it works better with a shell account!

You can use mod_gzip if you are running Apache. It compresses your files on the fly if the browser supports it. I think that is what El Nino meant by using gzip on the forums.

-joe

Originally posted by joe52
You can use mod_gzip if you are running Apache. It compresses your files on the fly if the browser supports it. I think that is what El Nino meant by using gzip on the forums.

-joe

do you have any idea what % browsers are compatable with mod_gzip apache modules ? is i.e. 5.x or greater compatable ?.

Since it's a module, and a preprocess procedure the browser isn't going to care.

What I have run into is with MSIE is that you do have to change a configuration in the mime.types file of Apache. I'd have to look at one of my server to refresh my memory, but I believe it was changing the mime type for the gz extension to octet-streamed, otherwise MSIE tried to load the binary on the browser page. I had written a website stats program that periodically zipped up the stats and made them available for download, but unzipped the on the fly for those who weren't sitting at a unix machine.

Netscape behaved, but MSIE quirked on it. Maybe the newer versions are smarter.:D

Maybe your old host have mod_gzip and your new host dont?

Older browsers (pre-HTTP 1.1) won't ncessarily support compressed content. Since most browsers in use today are HTTP 1.1-compliant, you shouldn't have a problem.

Apache with mod_gzip should send compressed content to browsers that identify themselves as being able to handle it and uncompressed content to all other browsers.

The mod_gzip faq is online here:
http://www.remotecommunications.com/apache/mod_gzip/mod_gzip_faq.htm

Nature of forums... not sure if you are asking me or not.

Since I have configured and compiled Apache in all instances that I spoke about, I can guarantee you the mod_gzip was *not* in any of them.

If you didn't direct that post to me... nevermind!

But, out of curiosity, who was it direct towards?

To valkaryn,

I believe I am on the unix machine, and besides the forum, there's almost nothing on my site. I am not the only one on that server.

The bandwidth usage from the cpanel is monthly accumulated number, for the daily usage, I just use simple math to get a figure.


To Synergy,

the mod_gzip might answer why the transfer doubled. But how come I got over 1GB transfer when I closed the forum (which counts 99% of all my bandwidth usage).

Thank you for your guys help.

ebird