Bandwidth abuse: arjanuitman.com

[Arjan]

Hi!

I recieved an e-mail from powweb with the next message:

Arjan,

Our daily report shows that your account for arjanuitman.com, is using
well over our allotted 12 GB of data transfer per month.

Currently, your website has been using 1195.87 MB/day which comes out
to
35876.1 MB of data transfer per month. Anything over 12 gigs will be
charged $8/gig per month. In order for us to continue hosting your
website, we need your acknowledgement that you've understand our
company
policy. Please sign and fax back our Bandwidth Agreement at
http://powweb.com/support/bandwidthform.txt.

If you are unable to lower your bandwidth to below 25 Gigs per month,
you will need to find hosting elsewhere. Powweb is not set up to
provide the extreme needs of such a site.

Our billing department will deduct any monies owned for current
bandwidth usage and refund the unused portion of all web hosting fees.

Please comply with this request within 24 hours to avoid suspension of
your account.

Sincerely,

Powweb Billing Department
http://powweb.com
billing@powweb.com

Your perfect hosting solution.


I think the reason of the extremely usage off my data transfer is because i have a lot of movies and pictures on my site.

What can i do? i have deleted al the movies and pictures off my site, and do you guys think that's enough?

And when answer Powweb my mail? i have sens an e-mail butt i don't have see a reply...

Sincerely, Arjan
http://www.arjanuitman.com

[Andrew]

Yep, the movies and pictures will use a lot of bandwidth. If you delete them, it will lower your bandwidth usage tremendously. You still need to fax the Bandwidth Agreement back to avoid interruption of your service. When you email support, an auto reply with a tracking code was sent to you. If you can give me the tracking code, I can follow up on your email.

[Arjan]

Thanks. We deleted a lot of pictures and movies. But do we still have to pay the extra bandwidth? I shall send the fax, but please don't deactivate the site. Is there a scripts or option where i can see the bandwidth i use. But how can it be that we use that lot of bandwidth because on the statistics show that we have less visitors. The links is http://arjanuitman.com/webstats and the link from our site is http://v1.nedstatbasic.net/s?tab=1&link=1&id=606477. Can you please take a look at it.

Regards, Arjan Uitman

[Andrew]

If you end up going over 12 gigs of data transfer for the month, you will be charged what you use over the 12 gig limit. Right now, only our system admin is able to track the bandwidth report. We will eventually incorporate this into OPS so every customer can view their own bandwidth report. The statistics programs you've used basically tracks number of hits, when and where the hits came from. It does not track bandwidth.

[keyplyr]

>But how can it be that we use that lot of bandwidth because on the statistics show that we have less visitors

I'll bet ya anything one or more people are hot-linking to your movies and running them on another site - except you are serving the files - hence the excessive bandwidth!

If this is the case, you could put your movies in a sub-directory in the cgi-bin so only your own domain could sucessfully call them, or you could employ a rewrite rule in your directory .htaccess file.

When I catch people hot-linking to my files, I like to have some fun by switching files and surprising them with something unexpected!

[Vern]

I just took a peek at your stats, I see alot of 500, 600, 700, 800, and a 961 visitor day and if I remember right from an earlier post from Andrew or Starr, the rule of thumb to keep it under 12 GB was 400 visitors per day.
The above is your Nedstat hits, but you Webstats tell a different story, which runs off your server logs which is 100-300 per day higher... In 7 days you had 6772 visits!!! WOW!!!

Means everything is bulked into this, including your own visits, html pages, all gifs and pics, backgrounds, counters, etc... into your bandwidth.
EACH visitor averaged 407k bandwidth PER PERSON.
And page views was around 12 pages per person.

I really like the work you did on your website, it is intense! But, REAL bad for powweb's setup.... and bandwidth.

At this rate, you will owe Powweb an EXTRA $96 over the $7.77 you already paid, just for this month's bandwidth......

Personally, I would take Andrew up on his Gracious offer and get a refund of money not used and find a Bigger host.
Plus get a .gif/.jpg cruncher to shrink your image sizes down to help with your bandwidth in the future and for the viewer too with faster load times.

[Starr]

Heheh, not 400 "visitors" per day, keep it under 400 "MB" per day (400MB x 30 days = 12 Gigs).

Your site should be able to handle thousands of unique hits per day. :)

[Vern]

Oooops!

I knew there was a 400 in there somewhere.....

Thanks! Starr!