Sudden massive increase in bandwith usage

Ganga

Well-Known Member
Oct 2, 2003
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166
Hello everyone.

All of a sudden, a site that used to consume less than 0.5 Gb a month seem to be consuming more than 1 Gb a day, and at first glanche nothing seems to justify a sudden drastic increase in bandwidth consumption.

What can I do to check what is causing the problem?

Awstats do not show a significant increase of either hits or bandwidth consumed.

Please kindly help.

Thanks
 

kris1351

Well-Known Member
Apr 18, 2003
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Lewisville, Tx
You might want to enabled anti-dos in APF if you are running it or invest in a floodguard type of product. We see this a lot as people will try to flood sites.
 

rpmws

Well-Known Member
Aug 14, 2001
1,787
10
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back woods of NC, USA
BuffaloWeb said:
same here...
In the last 2 days.
I had one that was reporting 200MB BW per month for 2 years average just broke the 10GB limit I had on his account. My mrtg graphs show serverwide bandwidth is actually down for the wole server this month, not up.

Also had another site that did about 10MB per month in total traffic hit 80% of 20GB today.

Something is up with the BW calculator.
 

Ganga

Well-Known Member
Oct 2, 2003
107
0
166
Please someone come to our rescue, even if it is a manual fix!!!

Thanks.
 

casey

Well-Known Member
Jan 17, 2003
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If you look under the bandwidth section of the user's control panel you can see when and what kind of traffic is being counted. Click on the current month and then scroll down and look at the day to day chart.
 

Ganga

Well-Known Member
Oct 2, 2003
107
0
166
Thank you Casey for the answer.

I'm having a look at the stats, but still I can't find anything that shows me the sudden peak of bandwidth (unless I'm completely idiot, which may well be the case LOL!!).

Two domains on this server seem to have been affected by this sudden increase of bandwidth.

Could it be that somehow cPanel is counting as traffic for a specific domain something that shouldn't be accounted for?

If it was a flood attack, how can I say that for sure?

Please help.

Thanks
 

casey

Well-Known Member
Jan 17, 2003
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191
Using cPanel X theme:

Web/Ftp Stats -> Bandwidth -> Click on domain next to month in question

Scroll down to the very bottom and you will see a chart with all the days of the month. The total should add up to whatever is being reported.

This type of bandwidth usage is normal. I'm not saying that it's impossible that cpanel has made a mistake in the calculations, but it is highly unlikely. If anything the cpanel calculations are below the actual usage.
 

mhbrands

Member
Apr 12, 2003
17
0
151
Kansas
you might also check to see if the bandwidth is being pirated. This takes a while, but check stats to see if any IPs/websites show up several times as 'viewing' the site, and then actually go to those IPs/websites. Sometimes you will discover that someone has copied the affected site page per page, but only linked it, so is not actually hosting anything. If this is the case (and yes, I have run into this on occasion) talk to your customer about .htaccess to make the website copy-proof.
 

Ganga

Well-Known Member
Oct 2, 2003
107
0
166
Thanks to both of you again for the answers.

I will check what you suggest and then post here my findings.

I have Hotlink protection on on the affected sites, so I doubt someone is hotlinking, but it's still worth checking.