Unexplained excessive bandwidth usage

Discussion in 'Site & Server Administration' started by outspan, May 3, 2012.

  1. #1
    Hey all,

    I have a website: http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/ on a hosting account with a 10GB monthly traffic limit. Looking at cPanel, it looks like I'm generating around 300MB of HTTP traffic a day, which is close to the limit.

    According to Google Analytics I only get around 500 visits and 2000 pageviews a month (and there's nothing to download, just content to read and some images). But on Statpress (Wordpress stat plugin) it says I get 300 visits and 1500 pageviews a day:

    [​IMG]

    How can I figure out where all those visits come from, and how do I stop them? I don't want to buy a more expensive hosting plan.
     
    Solved! View solution.
    outspan, May 3, 2012 IP
  2. MyLibary

    MyLibary Well-Known Member

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    #2
    If you really get 300 unique visits and 1500 page views every day it is totally reasonable.
    But im not sure google analytics will make a mistake about website visits.

    I will be glad to help you in privacy, will send you PM in order to help.
     
    MyLibary, May 3, 2012 IP
  3. inklight

    inklight Member

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    #3
    Use WASSUP Plugin To check your visitors and you will notice real visitor from bot by their activity
    and about bandwidth its really small if it paid hosting .but if it free you have many ways to reduce traffic
    1st ban all spammer IP's from C-Panel
    2nd upload your photos on free services like Photo or even use blogger to upload photos .
     
    inklight, May 3, 2012 IP
  4. DayaJosh

    DayaJosh Member

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    #4
    wassup plugin is one of the good plugin to monitor your WP blog. however do you have any files shared to download for your users ?
     
    DayaJosh, May 3, 2012 IP
  5. outspan

    outspan Active Member

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    #5
    Thank you, I have installed Wassup and it looks good, let's see how effective it is. I hope I won't spend too much time detecting and banning the IPs.
    No I don't have files for users to download. However I tried to click on Options > Save page on Chrome, downloading the full blog homepage complete with images. The total size of the images is 1.1 MB, is that normal? That shouldn't be downloaded when a visitor comes in, the images are resized before the page loads, right?

    Does the blog: http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/ take a very long time to load?
     
    outspan, May 3, 2012 IP
  6. outspan

    outspan Active Member

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    #6
    Thanks to your help (and Wassup's) I figured out that a lot of the traffic comes from comment spam bots that are not registered by Google Analytics. Askimet filters out about 150 spam comments a day, and the spam bots seem to navigate the site quite a bit before trying to post their comments, generating lots of HTTP traffic.

    I deactivated the KeywordLuv and NofollowFree WP plugins, and hopefully that will discourage the spambots (will it?).

    I don't think that banning the IPs of the spam bots is a good solution, is it? It's not very scalable. So what can I do if the problem persists?
     
    outspan, May 3, 2012 IP
  7. #7
    If your homepage is 1.1 MB to download, that is not normal. I took a look, and most of the images on your homepage are way too oversized for what they should be. For instance, instead of taking a big image, such as the space station image, and scaling it down using HTML, edit the source image so it is the exact size you want it to be on the homepage. That space station image alone is taking up 178kb of bandwidth every time a user visits that page, not to mention all of the other images on your homepage. If this practice is repeated on the site on all the pages that's probably where you're burning bandwidth.

    Resize the images to be the exact size they need to be on the page and optimize them when you save in a graphics program to cut down on bandwidth used each time they are loaded.
     
    BMR777, May 4, 2012 IP
  8. outspan

    outspan Active Member

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    #8
    Thanks, I have resized the images (although not completely, I need to get a WP plugin that automatically resizes them to the size I want) and already the folder size went from 1.1MB to 459kb, and I haven't even changed the file type yet!

    What size do you think I should aim for? What's reasonable for my homepage?
     
    outspan, May 4, 2012 IP
  9. BMR777

    BMR777 Well-Known Member

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    #9
    I think that 459kb is better, but I would aim for 300kb as a good size for the initial home page load. You can probably get there by optimizing the images even more. Your inner pages should be between 150 and 200kb I would think. :)
     
    BMR777, May 4, 2012 IP
  10. outspan

    outspan Active Member

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    #10
    Whoa... I checked a page and the folder size was 344kb... but posts are all around 1.6MB, which is unacceptable. See for instance this post: http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/solar-powered-ai-to-land-on-mars

    Could you please take a look and try and see what's wrong? It must be something that isn't here: http://wysinnwyg.com/blog/about (a normal page, not a post)

    Any idea what the jscripts "cN8Y0zZCPzI.js" and "all.js" could be? Also, these files are very large: cb=gapi.loaded0, nonSecureAnonymousFramework, rs=AItRSTPmLPWX6Le1YfULjXx8GUmSxw7mRg.

    I guess I found the reason for my excessive bandwidth :D
     
    outspan, May 4, 2012 IP
  11. outspan

    outspan Active Member

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    #11
    Turns out it was from the Digg Digg plugin (floating social sidebar)...
     
    outspan, May 5, 2012 IP