Hosting issues... am i using unnecesarry bandwidth

[dahunter]

I've pretty much crashed every server i had in the past 3 days, because i brought in too much traffic.

I'm not sure if im doing something wrong because i've used up 100 gb of bandwidth in 3 days, and the thing is it's not a fancy page it's just a simple html page with some text and images, and although im getting like 200k a day visitors i don't know if that would still add up to that much.

My question is if you guys know of a tool that would tell you if you are using unnecesary bandwidth or some sort of other solution for this i'd really appreciate it.

thanks,
Carlos

 

[AdHustler]

are you hosting media...some sort of video or audio cuz that could be the issue?

 

[tvmatt]

If your page is large at 100KB, 200k visitors would take around 20GB in a day - which is not far off from the 33GB that you're using. This forum page is around 90KB with the HTML, ad, and header image.

First of all, 100GB in 3 days (a little over 3Mbps constant) should not CRASH any server. Are you running on a dedicated server or a shared host? Plenty of dedicated servers come with 1000GB-2000GB allowances at the fairly inexpensive end of the industry.

Have you looked at any log analyzer software on your server (Webalizer, AWStats, or anything else) to tell you which files are being pulled? What is the full size of your page (images + html)?

 

[RhesusChrist]

Definitely look at your logs to see where the largest amounts of data sent is coming from as tvmatt suggested.
Also have a look at your site with Yslow or Page Speed Firebug extensions.

 

[dably]

In my experience the problem is rarely the bandwidth usage and usually something more problematic like too many mysql connections, or in the case of a static html page too many simoultaneous connections. Assuming you are using a dedicated server you can increase the number of workers, Apache default is something absurdly low like 64 or 128. On a decent quadcore you can probably get ~1500 or so without problems.

Another thing to consider is the amount of time that pages are open, for instance if your tracking/redirect (assuming it's on the same server) is slow it will increase the time on page causing the number of open processes to "pile up" and can crash a server, not to mention slow load times will hurt your profitablitiy.

Personally if I was going to run a few hundred thousand visitors a day I would go through one of the many cloud hosting companies Amazon, Mosso etc. You will pay a little bit more but it will cost you less money in the long run, unless you have a system admin that can put together some load balanced servers for you.

 

[canuq]

In my experience the problem is rarely the bandwidth usage and usually something more problematic like too many mysql connections, or in the case of a static html page too many simoultaneous connections. Assuming you are using a dedicated server you can increase the number of workers, Apache default is something absurdly low like 64 or 128. On a decent quadcore you can probably get ~1500 or so without problems.

Another thing to consider is the amount of time that pages are open, for instance if your tracking/redirect (assuming it's on the same server) is slow it will increase the time on page causing the number of open processes to "pile up" and can crash a server, not to mention slow load times will hurt your profitablitiy.

Personally if I was going to run a few hundred thousand visitors a day I would go through one of the many cloud hosting companies Amazon, Mosso etc. You will pay a little bit more but it will cost you less money in the long run, unless you have a system admin that can put together some load balanced servers for you.

All good suggestions. You can also look at reducing the keepalive timeout value or disabling keepalive completely.