Do hit bots use up your bandwidth

[buttster]

Was wondering if a trade using a hitbot of some sort would also use a lot of bandwidth on my wusage
Thanx Much

[amadman]

I belive hitbots request everything like a surfer.
If so then a hitbot hit would burn as much as a real surfer hit.

[domweb]

A link checking bot runs on a regular schedule, and usually only scans the page that has the link it's verifying.

The amount of bandwidth is pretty tiny. Most bots (in my limited knowledge) check links once a day or maybe once a week.

Unless some moron writes a bot to check your site every five minutes for the backlink, I wouldn't worry about the bandwidth.

[xxxjay]

Search engine hits use bandwidth too.

[stuveltje]

if i check my stat on ses it will tell me not seeking sites, it are the bots for ses, it will check but will not use that much of bandwitdh as surfers

[M.D]

Originally posted by amadman
I belive hitbots request everything like a surfer.
If so then a hitbot hit would burn as much as a real surfer hit.

Wrong,

Bots, crawlers, spiders ( excluding those offline browsing site downloading bots AND image search bots) use very little of your bandwidth when compared to browsers.

When using a browser, the browser reads the HTML code and execute it. it will download every css/script/jpeg/gif/bmp etc
that the web page indicates as needed for being written in its source code. otherwise the surfer will see non of the images you put "on the page".
for every img src , css & scripts href tags the browser will send a request to your server to recive it (using your bandwidth of course)

on the other hand,
Bots, crawlers, spiders etc will most likely need to visit your site for indexing it or validate part of your source code.
since the source code (the page HTML) is the only required element for indexing or validating parts of your code (to verify a recip link for example). only the source will be downloaded.

Bots that crawl for images or for offline browsing might and will most likely will use as much bandwidth as browsers.

If you will look at Google search results for example, you will see the size of each document right after the url before the "Cached" link.

[amadman]

Hmmm.... Sorry, I thought the question was about hitbots from trades. IE a cheater.

But the way these answers are going it seems that he meant a legit script from a tgp checking a gallery or something.

Granted the scripts would do only what they have to. Which would be very little in legit use. But it seems like a hitbot for trading would have to request everything like a real surfer or it would be easily identified.

But I could still be wrong.

[buttster]

I was really asking about hit bots used by trade cheaters

[M.D]

I got the picture,

as far as i know, hitbots are eventually judged according to their speed. the more hits/hour or hits/day they can generate, the more efficient they are.

I read about hitbots in the past (never owned one) and none of them mentioned any similarity to browsers except the user agent string.

1)if a hitbot will have to download all the graphics and script as well, it would become very slow.

2) most people/companies will use the services of a hosting company to host their sites and will most likely use their hosting company reports, a 3rd party software or a 3d party counter (you all know that).

When was the last time a counter or any log analyzing software was able to seperate hits by browser from hits by hitbot with a browser user agent string?
the answer of course is never. therefor the bots will only download the source and will not download any images. not because they care for your bandwidth but because they simply want to spend less of their time and bandwidth and look for another proxy to hit your site from.

if you are paying for this traffic you suspect you might lose more money than if it is only the bandwidth you pay for

to demonstrate, i am attaching a few lines i have copied from one of my non adult sites server log.
I paid Enhance for traffic and it was only later on i found a forum that contained alerts regarding faked clicks from them.

you can easily see a page was sent upon request, non of the page css files nor images were requested afterwards.
( i removed the referral urls only)

2004-09-22 20:14:57 80.46.28.154 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+4.01;+Windows+NT+4.0)
2004-09-22 20:16:54 66.178.7.6 GET /Default.asp - 200 Mozilla/4.5+[en-us]+(Win98;+I)
2004-09-22 20:20:52 210.0.200.2 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0;+MyIE2;+.NET+CLR+1.0.3705;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322)
2004-09-22 20:21:34 205.236.2.175 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1) 2004-09-22 20:31:29 194.3.30.188 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322)2004-09-22 20:35:36 208.252.68.66 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.5;+Windows+98)
2004-09-22 20:38:17 67.153.93.156 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+Crazy+Browser+1.0.5)
2004-09-22 20:39:58 212.213.70.4 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.1;+.NET+CLR+1.1.3705)2004-09-22 20:41:20 198.172.201.1 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.0;+Windows+95;+DigExt)
2004-09-22 20:42:23 213.157.14.3 GET /Default.asp enhance 200 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0;+.NET+CLR+1.1.4322)