crazy bandwidth

[rlhanson]

Okay - this is a site hosted on another provider as it is a service provided with the hosting... but I need some advice.

This is an amazon associate site. I have had over 9k new visitors and have used over 30000.00 Megs in the last month. Every other day I am using 5000 megs in bandwidth. (I've only generated 2 orders in the last week).

I was told it was probably a bot of some sort but I honestly don't know how to determine from my google analytics account if it is, or how to stop it.
Can anyone give me some direction on this? I would be happy to assign a user to my analytics account if there is more information needed.

Thanks so much!!!

[Matt]

Do you have access to your raw access logs or any logs at all for that matter? Do they give you any stats programs like webalizer or AwStats?

[rlhanson]

I have access to my analytics from Google and also in my amazon stats.

[Matt]

Well, it probably is a bot of some sort but why stop it? Maybe it is googlebot or some other good crawler that you want.

You really need access to some sort of log that shows IP addresses and how much transfer said IP address has consumed, or perhaps a log that shows which files have used the most data transfer and go from there.

I use webalizer for this purpose if I do not feel like digging through raw logs. Not sure what their stats offer.

[Matt]

Matter of fact I don't see how google analytics could tell you these figures since they would need to be analyzing the raw logs on the server itself. AFAIK and can see google analytics is basically a hit counter more than anything and does not give detailed info on actual files and consumption per IP.

They just show conglomerated graphs but not specific user agents. Without knowing the user agent, there is no way to block them.

[rlhanson]

Thanks Matt.
I logged into the cpanel and because I changed the analytics settings, I guess I lost the webstats.

I tried an .htaccess modification - hopefully I can find a happy medium of making sales and not making my hosting provider scream.

[andreadoria]

You need to review what exactly your page loads. Any big files there? 10k visitors seing say 15k pages at 500kb a page (say some html and 5 large images) = 7.5Gb of bandwidth.