Need help with bandwidth

[ShannonA]

I apologize in advance for sounding like such a rookie, but well I am. I took over ownership of a large website a few years ago, and I'm trying to learn as I go. Anyhow, we get a lot of traffic and I am trying to figure out what is suddenly eating up all our bandwidth. We currently are alotted 50 gig per month, and this month we have already exceeded that.

Where exactly do I find this info, and what exactly am I looking for? I know how to check my general stats page, but I don't know how to get the details and decipher them.

Thanks in advance.

Shannon A.
owner, www.surromomsonline.com

[Bob]

Shannon,

Stats are not one of my strongest points but generally if you access your Stats and click on Top URLs you should see the most accessed files and what you are looking for is KBytes sent.

More often then not All images will be in the top ten and to see what are the most used images you would click on that entry to see all your images and the transfer used for each.

You will also want to check All Refers to see where the traffic is coming from and this is where sometime you can locate a site that may be possibly using images from your site thereby stealing bandwidth.

In checking different stats at times I have found that if there is a problem it usually will stick out like a sore thumb, very large amount of transfer that just doesn't seem to make sense.

I have also found background images that are 150 KB in files size that are getting loaded with every page load and reducing that and/or similar files can sometimes make a huge difference.

However in some instances there just doesn't seem to be any specific problem area or anything that stands out which usually indicates a busy site that probably just needs to increase their package size.

Hope this helps,
Bob

[Matt]

Hello Shannon,

I took a quick look through your site and really didn't see anything obvious. It looks like most of the content is HTML. If this is the case, then I would recommend activating the gzip feature for your bulletin board and creating gzipped versions of your pages. To compress your pages, just gzip a page like links.htm and save it as links.htm.gz. It has been some time since I tried this, but I believe the compressed page will automatically load if the browser supports it. For more info, you can do a Google search for "mod_gzip." I found the following: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/web-output-mod_gzip-apache

If HTML comprises the bulk of your bandwidth usage and you are not utilizing mod_gzip, taking advantage of it could cut your bandwidth requirements in half (maybe more, since HTML compresses well).

Hope this helps.
-Matt