Bandwidth question

[Allfetish]

Originally Posted by sue-fl

Hi! I have no idea what section to post this in but anyways. As far as the tech part of my sever goes I know nothing. I have recently taken a quick jump in bandwidth. Not sure if this is a good thing (hope it is) or a bad thing. How much bandwidth would be "normal"? I have 150.00 GB and before the past two weeks I was fine. Today I'm looking to go over my limit

Anyone have any idea of what to look for in my stats to see if there is a problem? Is that amount of bandwidth consider low for a small webmaster with not a lot of traffic? HELP please!

That isn't a lot of bandwidth at all, especially if you are pushing movie galleries or sites.

Look in your stats to see if people are hotlinking directly to the movies going straight to a .mpg, .avi, ,wmv file instead of to a .html page. Check the top requested files as well as the referrers. If you are used to having a lot lower bandwith usage and are being hit by a forum or something, your logs should show one referrer with a ton of hits.

If you aren't being hotlinked and are getting traffic from good places, then it is a great thing usually. You gotta learn how to look at your stats and follow them. It is pretty vital. Ask your host about stats if you can't figure it out.

Sorry, you said you were a non techie so let me explain a few terms just in case :

Referrer- When you click on a link at http://GreenGuyandJim.com/ to say Digg.com, the referrer would be (basically) "http://GreenGuyandJim.com/". In other words the referrer is the page which the user clicked a link to get to your site.

Requested files- What files people are trying to get from your site. Often a stats program will list it "By KB (kilobytes)" are osmething like this. This will show you which requests for certain files are using the most bandwidth.