: Sites bandwidth exceeded but no increase in traffic? One of my clients sites has exceeded its 6000mb monthly bandwidth quota. I checked Analytics and the site has not had an unreasonable amount

@Cofer257

To clear up your initial confusion: Google Analytics uses Javascript, so only people visiting the site using regular browsers will register as visitors there.

Anyone can hit your site using something like wget. It's possible someone tried to download your entire site, or a bad search engine robot began crawling too fast (I believe search engines like Yandex are known for doing this). If you have access to server logs you should check those and see if it came from a particular user-agent or IP.

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@Murray432

CloudFlare works great. I use them for several sites.

Here's a very basic summary of how it works:


You update your DNS settings so that traffic to your site goes through CloudFlare first.
Because they protect a large number of websites they are able to see things, like IP addresses, that are responsible for unusual activity.
Once a certain threshold is reached CloudFlare will block that IP address from accessing websites protected using their services.
Since they use the network of sites they protect to monitor things their system can learn as it goes, which is great.
CloudFlare can prevent DDoS attacks as well, saving you resources and bandwidth by blocking the malicious traffic before it reaches your server.


Having your DNS route through CloudFlare also doesn't cause any lag, as CloudFlare is one of the fastest DNS providers on the web: blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-fastest-free-dns-among-fastest-dns
An additional benefit of CloudFlare is that they work like a Content Delivery Network, caching your files and serving them up from servers around the world.

On this page www.cloudflare.com/features-cdn they say:


your website, on average, loads twice as fast for your visitors
regardless of where they are located


You can also see stats like how much quicker you pages load, how much bandwidth CloudFlare saved you, and a few other things through their Dashboard.

There are also a bunch of optional features that you can enable, such as the option to serve up copies of your pages from their cache even if your server is unavailable, keeping your site online in such cases when it would typically become unavailable.

You can't go wrong, since they offer the service for free, so it's worth giving it a try like you have to see the benefits for yourself.

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