Server question
 

Tomorrow I will be billed an extra $150USD for going over bandwidth. The reason for going over was a forum I have, and it used over 1000GB of bandwidth for the month of November. For the month of november I just made $50USD from sponsor ads on my forum. I've never done galleries before but I hear people make decent money at it so would I make more money doing galleries, say 8 hours a week, than to continue leaving my forum up?

Your host is cheating you. Change provider.

I'm using ServerMatrix and they charge $0.50 per gig when you go over; and for me I got a server a while ago so my limit is 1000GB a month

What is your forums URL? How many users does it have? How many unique vistors a day?

1000 gigs of transfer for a forum is a bit high... unless it is GFY ;)

I always work with clients when they have unforeseen overages.

Wow that's nice but that doesn't answer my question, thanks for spamming my topic though.

well I've turned the forum off for the day so it doesn't matter.

I have over 2000 users, but I constantly remove leechers and squatters. If I didn't remove them I'd have over 10,000 members. I average 1600 uniques a day and 260,000 hits a day. The main reason for the high bandwidth useage is from allowing people to upload and watch videos.

You just answered your question....


Probably hotlinked also.....

No I have hotlink protection. But these videos are the main reason they come. Should I charge for entry into the videos sections or what?

Something is not right! you are being cheated!:2 cents:

Why are people saying you are being cheated? WTF do they know what youre hosting?


Charging admission into your videos area is up to you, as you will lose a considerable amount of visitors by charging a fee.
Perhaps its better to rethink what advertisers you have there to better target the traffic, and also the differant ways of content delivery you are using.


You can also try putting somewhere on the forum that people see all the time a message, such as "Please support /FORUM NAME/, visit these sponsors"

well my forum is http://www.juicyco.com . is it possible to determine if I am being hotlinked?

What type of forum? I might be interested in doing some advertising on it, post the URL.

Check out your apache referrer logs for that domain

What should I look for in the apache referrer logs?

domains which shouldnt be linking traffic to your site, for example.

visit the domains and see what reference they have to your site. you might find some pretty interesting links.

easiest way to do this, is load the domain/webpage that you see in the referrer logs, right click the page, click on View Source, hit CTRL+F, then type in your domain and hit find and see where its at and check it..


I assume you have cPanel, which means you have webalizer/awstats, check those for domains doing a lot of referring, and then dig deeper.

using the awstats/webalizer method is not an end all be all, you have to do it manually as well, otherwise you're going to keep getting screwed out of transfer.


what kind of hotlink protection do you have on? if you dont know how to write your own htaccess file for proper hotlink protection, cPanel has this built in for you.

but, this isnt a final solution either, as Im not sure if this protects you on the IP level, or if just domain wide. So some smart hotlinker might see its protected and attempt to IPlink you and might still be able to steal your transfer.

Hey Spike,
I know it's a pain in the butt changing servers, but if you are looking for cheaper high quality bandwidth email or ICQ us and we would be more than happy to help you out.

Thanks!
Bryan S.

I'll think about it

I originally modified the htaccess file so when someone clicked a posted link from my site they'd be sent to google, but if you type it in manually into the "Address" bar or in Windows Media Player you can view it, thus use my bandwidth. How do I protect against people from hotlinking my videos?

I run a busy picture and video froum on phpbb also. If your content is unique you should charge for it. Not a lot, just enough to atleast keep your servers up. I can tell you right now with phpbb and video and pic content, you will outgrow a servermatrix server real quick.

Just my 0.02 but servermatrix really sucks.. If I was you I would look for a dual xeon machine with like a 10mbps flate rate line. It will save you a ton in the end.

My site is big by no means
but it runs on (3) dual xeon machines and a 30mbps flate rate line, and still gets choked up somtimes.

What is your forum and who do you use for your servers? And how do you make $ to pay for your 3 dual xeon machines?

There a million ways to do it, be creative :thumbsup

put the forum back up

find your log

tail -f /home/user/site/httpd.log | more

watch the traffic go by see where the links are coming from

which is your forum and who do you use for your dual xeon servers?

site: http://www.NowThatsFuckedUp.com

host: http://www.leaseweb.com

Their prices are very, very, good but there downfall is they are not 24/7 support which kinda sucks

so you pay for a years worth of hosting through a simple donation box? and to sign up for PPSbill, to use their credit card services, do you need a credit card yourself?

they arnt in the USA, so if your traffic is mostly USA, everythings going to go real slow. Took a while to even load leaseweb's page.

I would have them double check the 95th percentile computation. I would imagine that it would be pretty hard to go over that much. I could be ah honest accounting error. I have had to double check those before myself.

Create a PHP script to manage dynamic files management from sources at Geocities/other free providers. LOL :1orglaugh