Excessive Bandwith Consumption execssive bandwith consumption

[eddygalvin 0]

hello,i recently setup a hosting account to test run a proxy with my desktop application. i signed up for a 10gig monthly bandwidth.But i have noticed something about the bandwidth consuption has been relatively high. more than 7gig in less than 48 hours. i would like to know what could have caused the increase in bandwidth consumption. thanks

[Maggot 1]

Did you try contacting your hosting provider ?? It could be a simple mistake.....If i remember right there are logs in cpannel to track your bandwidth consumtion.....Some of the ways i know how bandwidth could be used up....Bandwidth is calculated according to what you have uploaded or downloaded to and from your current web host....If you have uploaded a lot of files....If you have downloaded thoses files....If you host a file and others keep downloading....

[eddygalvin 0]

i have just contacted the host provider about the issue.i checked the logs and the traffic consumption and all i see is just HTTP consumption for two day and 7gig exhausted.i think something is going wrong.

[rvalkass 5]

7GB in 48 hours is quite a lot - around 150MB every hour. Have a look at your logs and see if you can find out anything more about the bandwidth being used. For example, is it a constant high level of around 150MB/hour or are there very large spikes followed by periods of low transfer? Can you find out which files are being accessed most often, and the amount of bandwidth used up by those files? Also see if you can find out how much bandwidth is being used by each IP address visiting your site. If one IP address is using huge amounts of bandwidth compared to the others, you might want to consider banning that IP address if it is such a problem.

[The Simpleton 2]

This could be a problem of being under attack from a (single or set) IP address. As rvalkass suggested, try finding out which IP addresses caused the most damage in those 48 hours. If everything seems good and legit, then I think the only valid explanation for this is that your site is popular!

[deadmad7 4]

I think this might be a DOS attack. Have you told anyone about you site recently? Or published widely in forums,blog,etc.? Or you have competitor who wants to bring now your site. You could ban the person's IP address as soon as possible or take down your site for a few days and put it back online -- but its the exact thing that the attacker probably wants. Try complaining about the problem to your hosting provider, they must know what to do

[eddygalvin 0]

For example, is it a constant high level of around 150MB/hour or are there very large spikes followed by periods of low transfer? Can you find out which files are being accessed most often, and the amount of bandwidth used up by those files?

i have checked the ip log i see very large spikes followed by periods of low transfer.

but i cant find out the files that are being accessed most frequently. please how do i check the amount of bandwidth used by those files. thanks.

[fermin25 3]

There are a lot of situations that can ocassionate you to spend this amount of bandwith and in some ocasions I have suffered this type of downswing in my bandwith. One of the reasons is maybe the script that you are using and the type of site you have, for example is know that some scripts spend more bandwith than others like a forum script with a mp3 script that runs with cron jobs almost all the days and spend the bandwith including with anybody is connected to the site. So if you have this type of script like a mp3 searcher to offer free downloads from your site maybe 10GB is not the proper amount of bandwith that you require. Other case can be that you have a free premium link generator site with a script like Rapidleesh or Rapidshot to offer free premium link generator service and this is a type of site that I had hosted in the past and spend me almost all the bandwith in a few days. It was typical in 10 days to see the "Account out of Bandwith" when I tried to access to my site since my browser. So if you are offering this type of site I have to tell you that you need and unlimited hosting plan with some provider or if you have your hosting account with xisto maybe the anual plan of $99 can be for you. Other posibility and the most probable is that you are hosting a file in your server like a game, a movie or something that is 100MB+ and some people maybe get tracked this file and they are downloading the file that is the same to decrease your bandwith 100MB a time and of course your bandwith will be decreasing until you will have any bandwith to use.So please you have to check with your FTP client your files or your script and try to research about the posibility of a DOS attack althougth I doubt about it because now almost all the hosting providers have DOS protection and some providers don?t have this feature in general but they offer for a few bucks this feature for some clients that want to be protected from a DOS attack.So please research about your problem and any update please post it here.Bye.

[eddygalvin 0]

"So please you have to check with your FTP client your files or your script and try to research about the posibility of a DOS attack althougth I doubt about it because now almost all the hosting providers have DOS protection and some providers don?t have this feature in general but they offer for a few bucks this feature for some clients that want to be protected from a DOS attack.Dos attack? i know nothing about that but i am going to find out more about it.i checked the access log and found that all the bandwidth was only used by the http traffic.this was as a result of the proxy script that was running on the web server. the proxy script sucked up all the bandwidth.------------------------------------------------------- i have been able to find some work around it. doing some tweaking on the script.this will hopefully reduce the amount of bandwidth used.-------------------------------------------------------

Edited August 23, 2010 by eddygalvin (see edit history)

[vhortex 1]

You will surely hit that consumption in just a couple of days and the reason was....You are running a proxy script/server. Proxies hide people from the rest of the world by actively being the server to browse and connect to the world in behalf of the user. Example, a webproxy script was running that will hide a users browsing activity..When the user type in the web address in the script input form and hit the submit button, the script will be the one that will visit the site and reads back the resulting page and echo it back to the user. This consumes bandwidth equal to the total size of the files being viewed and a few more for the fetching the result page content.Proxies always consume bandwidth every second while they are being used.