badwidth abnormal

[John_80]

my website is using too much bandwidth everyth month it consumes over 10gig of bandwidth but i dont get to see any emails. someone suggested its because someone is attacking my website somehow. i see most of the traffic comes from india how can i fix this. will changing the folder paths prevent this

[diafol]

Have you talked to your host? Why should you be getting emails?
10Gb is heavy - are you hosting large images or your own videos?
Is your website contentious?
You can block ip addresses or even specific countries if you really need to, but you need to delve into your analytics to see what's going on.

[John_80]

my reasoning is that the more bandwidth i consume (website) means more people are visiting the website which will translate into more emails. just got an email from my host saying most of the traffic is coming from india. i am afraid that blocking a country will make the website lose potential customers.

[rtrethewey]

If you have a usage/statistics package running on your website, you should be able to see where all of this bandwith usage is coming from. It could be one or more websites linking to your content (especially images), or it could be what's called a scraper - which is a bot that blindly fetches content. I'm sure that there are many other posssible explainations, but you need to track it down even if it means checking the server log files.

[diafol]

Ok you've had it from both of us: check your analytics and / or log files. You can't fix it unless you know the cause.

[John_80]

thnx guys, my next question is how do i fix it. i checked the logfiles and it seems to be a bot targetting images. it accesses the images hundreds of times a day. is it possible to block a certain ip address from accessing any of my content (images, links) e.t.c

[diafol]

is it possible to block a certain ip address from accessing any of my content (images, links) e.t.c

My original reply:

You can block ip addresses or even specific countries if you really need to

C'mon John...

http://www.thesitewizard.com/apache/block-bots-with-htaccess.shtml

[drjohn]

The control panel for some web sites can include an option to prevent leaching - letting another site display your images on their site and pretending they are their images. Look through your control panel and if you have such an option, switch it on. See if that helps by checking your web stats on a daily basis.

[diafol]

You can also stop hot-linking - perhaps this is what dr john's leaching is referring to - from your htaccess by "denying".

[drjohn]

yup. leaching, hot-linking, and some other names too. depends on control panel designer's choice of name.

[codevzv]

10 gb my friend.only bz images, videos. first if some uploading images and vides on ur website check on that.. then check ur new uesrs too