Something funny going on....plz look

Discussion in 'Site & Server Administration' started by kes, Oct 23, 2008.

  1. #1
    Hi,

    Weird stats showing on my server..

    I have Mihalism Multi image hosting site which gets about 20 visitors per day..

    but the traffic on my server says im using 21,000 MB of traffic per month.

    On the same server i have a forum which gets 250+ visitors per day

    but the server says thats only using 2,400 MB a month

    Is there something im missing with the image hosting site????
     
    kes, Oct 23, 2008 IP
  2. Christian Little

    Christian Little Peon

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    #2
    People are probably hotlinking the images you are hosting which is sucking up your bandwidth, it's the bane of all image hosts.

    Most image hosting scripts will give your visitors a URL and BB code to use on forums.

    For example, let's say I upload an image. They give me this code:

    [​IMG][​IMG]

    However I'm an ass, so I just go through the code and pull out the actual image and can now pull this from their server:

    [​IMG]


    The first image is only 6k, the second is 71k. Furthermore the second image doesn't link back to your site, which gives no traffic to you but sucks up your bandwidth.

    Now do the math here, let's say I show that image 1,000 times:

    Image 1 will suck up 6mb
    Image 2 will suck up 71mb

    Add a few hundred images and you get your bandwidth black hole that you are facing.

    Welcome to image hosting :)

    The only way to fix this is to setup hotlink protection in your cpanel, but I don't know if that will work with an image hosting script.
     
    Christian Little, Oct 23, 2008 IP