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
-
Using Button Links vs Sidebar Menu
I have a services page with a lot of rich text and a slideshow of images. Currently, I am using a column of buttons to various services, and am wondering if a sidebar menu would be more effective for Google to crawl and rank?
Web Design | | cinchmedia0 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Could our drop in organic rankings have been caused by improper mobile site set-up?
Site: 12 year old financial service 'information' site with lead gen business model. Historically has held top 10 positions for top keywords and phrases. Background: The organic traffic from Google has fallen to 50% of what it was over the past 4 months compared to the same months last year. While several potential factors could be responsible/contributing (not limited to my pro-active removal of a dozen old emat links that may be perceived as unnatural despite no warning), this drop coincides with the same period the 'mobile site' was launched. Because I admittedly know the least about this potential cause, I am turning to the forum for assistance. Because the site is ~200 pages and contains many 'custom' pages with financial tables, forms, data pulled from 3rd parties, custom/different layouts we opted for creating a mobile site of only the top 12 most popular pages/topics just to have a mobile presence (instead of re-coding the entire site to make it responsive utilizing a mobile css). -These mobile pages were set up in an "m." subdomain. -We used bi-directional tagging placing a rel=canonical tag on the mobile page, and a rel=alternate tag on the desktop page. This created a loop between the pages, as advised by Google. -Some mobile pages used content from a sub page, not the primary desktop page for a particular topic. This may have broken the bi-directional 'loop', meaning the rel=canonical on the mobile page would point to a subpage, where the rel=alternate would point to the primary desktop page, even though the content did not come from that page, necessarily. The primary desktop page is the one that ranks for related keywords. In these cases, the "loop" would be broken. Is this a cause for concern? Could the authority held by the desktop page not be transferred to the mobile version, or the mobile page 'pull away' or disperse the strength of the desktop page if that 'loop' was not connected? Could not setting up the bi-directional tags correctly cause a drop in the organic rankings? -Our developer verified the site is set up according to Google's guidelines for identifying device screen size and serving appropriate version of page. -Are there any tools or utilities that I can use to identify issues, and/or verify everything is configured correctly? -Are we missing anything important in the set-up/configuration? -Could the use of a brand new subdomain 'm.' in and of itself be causing issues? -Have I identified any negative seo practices or pitfalls? Am I missing or overlooking something? While i would have preferred maintaining a single, responsive, site with mobile css, it was not realistic given the various layouts, and owner's desire to only offer the top pages in mobile format. The mobile site may have nothing to do with the organic drop, but I'd like to rule it out if so, and I have so many questions. If anyone could address my concerns, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Greg
Web Design | | seagreen0 -
Is there something fundamentally wrong with our site architecture?
Hi everyone! Could a few of you brilliant people take a look at the architecture of this site http://www.ccisolutions.com, and let me know if you see any obvious problems? I have run the site through XENU, and all of our most important pages, including categories and products, are no deeper than level 3. Everything deeper than that is, in most cases, an image, a pdf or an orphaned page (of which we have thousands). Could having thousands upon thousands of orphaned pages be having a more hurtful effect on our rankings than our site architecture? I have made loud noises and suggested that duplicate content, site speed and dilution of page authority due to all those orphaned pages are some of the primary reasons we don't rank as well as we could. But, I think those suggestions just aren't sexy or dramatic enough, so there is much shaking of heads and discussion that it must be something fundamentally wrong with site architecture. I know re-arranging the furniture is more fun than scrubbing the floors, but I think our problems are more about fundamental cleanup than moving things around What do you think?
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Time On Site and SEO?
Does time on site impact rankings? If a person visits your site from the serps or directly visits it by typing in your name in the search field and then leaves within a minute, will that impact your serps? What is the best way to increase time on site?
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content
Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,
Web Design | | Ashkan10 -
Making a third-party hosted blog look like a folder on the main domain
I have a client that has a "completely pristine" Microsoft.net web environment that is unwilling to put a wordpress installation on their server. Their management team wants a wordpress blog for the marketing department. Is there a means where we can host the wordpress blog with a regular hosting company but yet have it appear as part of the main site e.g., mainsite.com/blog vs. having to put it in a subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) and lose all the SEO benefits of the blog content?
Web Design | | jtroia0