So my site has been down for about 24 hours. Did you miss me? (Sometimes I’d love to see the expressions on my reader’s faces, I bet there is more than one person out there rolling their eyes right now)
The problem is that I had exceeded my bandwidth. Not that it was a big surprise, I had been monitoring the traffic to my site almost on a daily basis, hoping it wouldn’t go over. In fact, I had just increased the bandwidth a couple weeks back. It’s up to 17GB of bandwidth a month right now.
Frankly, I have no allusions of grandeur…I know for a fact all 17GB of traffic coming to my site aren’t individual people looking for my divine insight. I’m grateful if even just a handful of people out there find it worthwhile to even read this regularly.
In actuality, there’s a reasonable percentage of real traffic. I get maybe anywhere from 150 – 200 unique visitors a day to this site. (hello!) Not bad considering I really haven’t made any effort to market this.
What really is giving me a pain in the rear end is the bandwidth being eaten up by bad bots and search engines. You know I don’t mind of search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo come and archive the content on my site, but they say there’s a lot of random bots out there doing not much else but farming content from websites for no good reason at all. Summammabeetch. If I’m reading my report right I have like 9GB of traffic just on random bots alone.
I gotta find a way to ban these bastards. So far the information found online to combat these bots aren’t very specific. I’ll report back if I find a way. I seem to notice any of my clients with photography websites seem to be encountering problems like this lately.
LoweStudio Inc was founded by me, Raphael Lowe, a Honolulu based illustrator and web designer. I presently design and manage a few dozen commercial websites, but my main focus these days is acting as the head developer for Kapiolani Community College and teaching
Aloha Alan,
you mean your photography websites are getting hit by robots? Can you tell by the logs if its mostly the images that are getting sucked down?
Regards,
Nestor
P.S. Glad your back online. I was starting to go through withdrawal!
@Nestor
Well I’ve stared at these types of website logs for years and years. I think only recently (within the past 2 or 3 years) I’ve seen a lot more bot activity than ever before.
2 trends I think we’re seeing (1) search engines are way more aggressive then they used to be in following links around your website and (2) programs like Google Images are designed to suck down a lot of photo and image content.
Before Google Images came around I don’t recall seeing as much of this high volume bot activity..especially noticeable for photographer clients I’m involved with. I’ve had to increase their bandwidth a lot as well.
Yes, you can generally see what images get hit the most.