bandwidth issues... what the heck?

[MariaV]

Bandwidth on one of my sites has gone from 7Gb to over 12Gb in the last month.

Number of actual visitors is actually DOWN on last year!!!!!

What the hell is causing this? can somebody be hacking my site and using bandwidth or something?

The site itself is pretty much the same as it was this time last year... Is there anything I should be looking at in Plesk or Google analytics that might shed light on this?

It's not like we're getting hundreds of orders every day. Other sites we have show increase/decreases in bandwidth commensurate with visitor numbers.

Here's the site: http://www.pedigreecharm.co.uk

[fergusw]

Ask your hosting company for a break down of the 12Gb of traffic.
They should be able to inform you how much of that was FTP, Email and web traffic accordingly.
Finally check your website statistics (most good hosting companies provide a statistics package) so that you can check the web traffic through your website.

These two things should help you identify if there are any unusual spikes within the statistics.

[Mike Hughes]

It could be someone hotlinking to your images. Often done from forums. A look in your server stats logs should show what it is.

Your pages are also on the large size with your home page being about 334 Kbytes. If that was typical then 12 GB would be 36,000 page views a month or around 1,200 a day. How does that compare with your actual page views?

Mike

[MariaV]

Page views last month 30K... so around 20% less.
Any ideas as to how I can reduce page size... it's not as if there's much in the way of images on the home page (95Kb)... so what's causing the damage?

Any remedies?

[MariaV]

Ask your hosting company for a break down of the 12Gb of traffic.
They should be able to inform you how much of that was FTP, Email and web traffic accordingly.
Finally check your website statistics (most good hosting companies provide a statistics package) so that you can check the web traffic through your website.

These two things should help you identify if there are any unusual spikes within the statistics.

LOL... will chase Actinic on this as they are hosting the site. Can't seem to find any meaningful stats from the Plesk control panel.