Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

[acousticmirror]

I recently moved from Apollo to Hostasaurus. I have the Shared Hosting - Warehouse hosting. I have 50GB of available data transfer per month as well as 2.5GB of avalable disk space.

Last month (my first full month with Hostasaurus) I hit over 250GB of data transfer! Having a site with about 170 mp3 files, I assumed that was the issue. I moved all of the audio files to SoundCloud and deleted the mp3's from my server. Now, after doing that, I'm clocking in at about 20+ BG per day of data transfer (about double wha tit was last month, BEFORE removing all of the audio files). My traffic has not changed, my styatistics reporting are showing no changes at all.

The size of my storage that I'm taking up on the server is less than 500 MB and I can't figure out how the data transfer is so high.

Anyone else experience this or have any ideas?

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

What's your domain? You can PM it to me if you'd rather not post it.

[acousticmirror]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

www.lollarpickups.com

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

The issue appears to be some type of image/banner rotation script in your blog that came with one of your themes. Here's the script causing the issue (you may not want to click the link, read further first):

http://lollarguitars.com/blog/wp-content/themes/black-letterhead/rotate.php

If you visit it, it will attempt to send the following errors over and over until the 90 second php execution timeout occurs:

Warning: opendir(./images/): failed to open dir: No such file or directory in /var/www/vhosts/lollarguitars.com/httpdocs/blog/wp-content/themes/black-letterhead/rotate.php on line 19 Warning: readdir() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/vhosts/lollarguitars.com/httpdocs/blog/wp-content/themes/black-letterhead/rotate.php on line 21 Warning: readdir() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/vhosts/lollarguitars.com/httpdocs/blog/wp-content/themes/black-letterhead/rotate.php on line 21.....


I suspect it's attempting to open a directory that doesn't exist where the script expects it to, which is probably within /httpdocs/blog/wp-content/themes/black-letterhead/, but why it never gives up is probably just poor programming by the author of the script; it should see what it wants is unavailable and exit.

So what is probably occurring is people who visit the blog, without knowing it, are receiving huge amounts of data that is never displayed since all this output is probably housed inside an html image tag, so visitors don't even realize they're being fed hundreds of megabytes of data behind the scenes since their browser can't display it anyway. I had a network monitor running while looking at it and I had hit 800 megabytes after about a minute before stopping the page load.

You may just need to reinstall the theme to fix it, or perhaps create an images directory which might eliminate the error but won't make the script do what it should be doing since it probably expects some images to be in that directory.

[acousticmirror]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

Thanks, David! I've been trying to figure this out since May, I'll get to work on trying to fix it now...

[acousticmirror]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

David,

I can't seem to find where that rotate.php link resides in the blog, so I removed it all together from the location on the server. The blog seems to still be working as it should. Will that alone fix the issue??

[Datagg]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

I remember that rotate.php back in the day... Was trouble, got rid of it...

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

Looks like you've got it; your visits per day have remained constant while your bytes per day have decreased about sixfold.

[acousticmirror]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

Though my daily transfer rates have decreased since deleting that file, they still seem high to me. I'm at about 3GB per day still and I can't figure out why. Got any other suggersions?

Thank you,

[acousticmirror]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

I believe there may be an issue with the reporting as well. When I look at my data transfer statistics on the Parallels Plesk Panel it shows that my FTP transfer is 0. I have been transferring lots of data via FTP since June but it has never shown anything but a 0. I transferred my entire site in July but it never showed any data transferred other than HTTP transfers

[ILoveHostasaurus]

Re: Data Transfer exceeding 20GB per day, anyone know how to stop this?

We don't count the FTP traffic so it's intentionally zero.