I have seen so many posts in this forum along the lines of: XXXX is wasting my bandwidth that must use a lot of bandwidth etc I dont really understand why people even think about it. Do somepeople pay per bandwidth used or have limits or something? Cheers Jamie
Depending on your hosting plan you may have to pay for bandwidth usage - that's people accessing your site. It's a common concept in the USA see www.handsonwebhosting.com for example. Some hosts will bill you if you exceed your bandwidth, others will disconnect your site until the month rolls over. What most people don't realise is that your site is being hit constantly by bots (good and bad) and referral spammers. Trying to track down all the bots won't do much more than waste your time and the referral spammers will be pretty hard to lock down too. So, if you're having a hard time with them you have a few choices waste your time finding out which to block upgrade your hosting account to allow more bandwidth live with it but I'm also guessing you don't have bandwidth limits so it's a non-issue. A secondary issue is DNS attacks where they're just trying to keep the server so busy that the service for real human visitors is slow or non-existent. That's another problem altogether.
Yes some people pay for bandwith most of my servers i have to pay EUR0.15 per GB over 2TB / month but i also have unmetered boxes with no limits except 10mbit flat out (ive been pulling 3TB month no problems) you see bandwith is very cheap, but some hosts try to make a selling point out of it!!