Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
My Site Is Using A Lot of Hosting Bandwidth. Suggestions?
-
My website http://www.socialseomanagement.com/ is using tons of bandwidth. I received a message from the hosting company saying I exceeded my monthly bandwidth and it has only been a few days. Can anyone take a look and make suggestions?
Thanks
-
Something doesn't sound right there. You can't have 3112 unique visits from 12093 unique visitors, unless your log file program is using those terms in a different way. If your log file program lets you, you should be able to see which files haven been using the most bandwidth.
-
As of the October 4th these were my statistics for the month of October:
These statistics are based on the October 2012, so far:
- 427K hits
- 3112 unique visits from 12K sources
- 2.65GB data
- 12093 unique visitors
-
Hmm.. Based on the other responses above my load time was not very long. Did you try visiting more than once?
-
Is there a way to test the speed of the server also? I am checking my server logs as you suggested to see if someone is linking to our images...
-
The reason the site "looks" to tools like it takes a long time to load is because the Google+ API call and the Facebook Connect call are taking an obscenely long time to negotiate their SSL connections - over 11 seconds.
Fortunately the essential user-visible parts of the page (up to document complete) load quickly so the user experience is fine. Might be worth trying to figure out why the SSL negotiation on those 2 files is getting killed so badly though.
Here's a link to the page load Waterfall View that clearly shows the long purple lines indicating SSL delay for those 2 scripts.
-
Your homepage is a little over 900kb which isn't massive by any means. Your homepage loads in a little over 3.5 seconds from a Virginia location using the equivalent of a slow cable connection so it looks very-well speed optimized to me.
If you've seen that big a jump in bandwidth use with no accompanying jump in traffic, my strong guess is that some other site is leaching your content (otherwise known as hotlinking).
Typically, this means somebody else has embedded images from your site into their own, meaning every time their page displays the image, it loads form your server/bandwidth instead of their own. (Can also happen with other file types)
Some sites do this because they don't know any better, and sometimes it's malicious. I've seen this often happen from forums where a whole page of post images loads every time the thread is viewed. To see if this is happening, you'll need to check in your server logs. Google Analytics won't show it as the images aren't tagged with the tracking code.
If hotlinking is the problem, the only way to stop it is to tell your server to only display images that were requested from your own website pages. You do this through the htaccess file. If your site uses cPanel for it's hosting control panel, there's actually a button on the Panel in the Security section to disable hotlinking. I assume most other control panels have something similar. Be aware that this will disable ALL images from showing on other sites, including any badges etc you may have created for other sites to display intentionally.
Paul
-
Do you have plugins?
-
Load time can be a server issue, a software/coding issue, and/or a filesize issue.
4GB of bandwidth in 4 days is a lot - that's how much my site that gets 30K+ uniques per month has used. Based on Alexa rank, it looks like your site doesn't get that much traffic? Have you had an uptick in traffic?
You can check page and file sizes at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ That tool shows your homepage and associated files has a total size of 1MB. To use 4GB of bandwidth at that rate, you'd need ~4,000 pageviews.
You could run your top pages through that tool and see if any of the embedded images or other files are too large.
You could also check your log files to see if someone has embedded an image from your site, you're getting crawled by robots, etc.
Hope that helps!
-
Plus the site already caches...
-
I am using Drupal.
-
Nearly 4gb in 4 days... The slider images are rather large. Are there any good compression tools? Yahoo smushit didnt make much of a difference.
Any advice on how to make it load faster? Or is that a server issue?
-
The site appears to use Drupal. A cache plugin may make the pages load faster, but it won't change the amount of bandwidth used.
-
Well, you're probably either getting more traffic and/or maybe you need to optimize your file sizes.
How much bandwidth have you used?
Usually images or videos are what gobbles up bandwidth. Are you hosting any large images, videos, or files?
-
Hi James,
Your site loading takes quite some time. Although graphics load quickly, there is still something loading in the background.
I suggest checking out which plugins you are using and disable one by one to see what could be conflicting with the load times.
I'm not sure which CMS you are using but I suggest getting a cache plugin to make loading times more quick if its images slowing load times(probably not since graphics loaded quick).
-
Load time was pretty long. How are your file sizes?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Incorporating Spanish Page/Site
We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page. Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site? I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Will interlinking using dynamic parameters in url help us in increasing our rankings
Hi, Will interlinking our internal pages using dynamic parameters(like abc.com/property-in-noida?source=footer) help us in increasing our rankings for linked pages OR we should use static urls for interlinking Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site. We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic. I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
Web Design | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Best Webhosting Suggestions??
Good morning my fellow Mozzers! I am currently looking at adding some diversity to my current web hosting and I was hoping I could get some suggestions. I dont currently need a VPS or Dedicated Server, I just need some shared hosting, you know, packeges that are sub $20 a month...i mean i will pay more than that, but so far everything i look at that meets my needs(basic hosting, email, ect...). This is for client sites and they are growing in number somewhat rapidly. I currently host with GoDaddy and they are amazing in the support department, but I do question whether their servers are causing slow page loads ect...but all in all I am happy with them. I have used Netword Solutions in the past, but left them because i was not a big fan of talking to support people in india and malasia. I do think that their servers might have performed better than GoDaddy so i am not ruling them out at this point i am looking for a provider that has excellent support and who has servers that are not so overloaded the can render pages and content slowly. Performance is very important to me. I am not looking for the cheapest, I am looking for the overall best. Thanks in advance SEOmoz family!!!
Web Design | | WebbyNabler0 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0 -
How will it affect my site if i link to a site with adult content?
We are currently working on creating 2 sites for a company, one with no adult content, one with adult content. Will it affect the non adult content site if i link to the other one in terms of Google and being blocked by some internet providers.
Web Design | | MattWheatcroft0 -
Should I use the google mod_pagespeed in my apache server?
Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Flat vs. Silo Site Architecture, What's Better
I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.
Web Design | | C-Style0