Bandwidth issues?
If your site is suddenly using a lot of bandwidth (and by lot, I mean, LOT), you may be attacked by a spambot. A friend of mine has recently seen 80% of her bandwidth used up in just a few days. If your site suddenly uses a lot of bandwidth, you may want to check what's happening... here are some directions, if you're using cPanel:
- Log in and go to "Web/FTP stats > Bandwidth" and see which subdomain is taking the more bandwidth.
- Go to "Web/FTP stats > Subdomain stats" and scroll to "Awstats", and click on the "guilty subdomain" link.
- In the sidebar, go to "Who > Hosts > Full list", you'll see a green column with "Bandwidth", just check who is taking the most gigabytes... A normal visitor will usually download only a few megabytes, if it's gigabytes, it's certainly a spambot, or a domain direct linking your files. Note the IP address and you can "whois" it.
- Go to IP Deny manager and block the IP...
- You may also want to disable hotlinking: go to "Hotlink protection" and check if all your subdomains are listed as "URLs to allow access", you may also want to add some URLs, such as forums where you use custom avatars hosted on your domain, etc. When you're ready, click "activate". In the "URL to redirect to" field, I recommend you to make an image file with your URL on it, and host it on an other server, like imageshack, etc.
I hope the directions are comprehensible. :)
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Works? Doesn't work? Other tips? Please leave a comment! :)