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View Full Version : Moved from Shared to Dedicated ~ BW went from <20GB to over 100GB / month?



jimmih
08-01-2008, 07:49 AM
Hello all,

I came across this forum as a potential spot to inquire on a problem i have recently encountered.

For 11+ years, my sites resided with the same service provider in a shared environment. As the site(s) grew so did the demands on the server. So much so that in April we decided to move it to a dedicated server. At the time, i reviewed past usages and never once did we every go over our 20GB/month bandwidth allocation on the shared server. In fact, i basically ported most of the same requirements over to the new dedicated server in order to keep costs down as i am required to keep the overall costs under a certain threshold.

After all the initial set up, testing and ftp'ing, we were finally moved over. However within about a month, we were compromised, which lead to massive spike in BW (200GB over the month of May, 185 over the month of June and the attack was only in place for about 10 days, 4 in May, 6 in June). Suffice it to say, we found the weakness, locked it up (And then some) and have been fine ever since. We actually went so far as to pull the server from the rack and completely rebuild it to ensure nothing was left behind to cause problems. However, it prompted us to monitor much more closely what is happening on our server. Here's where the fun part starts!!!

After about 6 weeks now of monitoring, it is now evident that we use on average about 3 - 3.5 GB of throughput per day. This in essence equates to around 100GB/month of bandwidth usage........ Is this allot? I tend to think so. What i don't understand is... Why did it spike AFTER we moved to a dedicated server?

The ISP is saying that we must have changed the site OR that something is still open that is being compromised. The thing is the site is THE same AND i even had a full server audit done by the ISP in house and they did not find anything out of the ordinary???

To give a perspective, we average about 80,000 unique visitors/month. The site is basically a version of Ebay (Lots of photos BUT all reduced in file size). At any given time, we have about 28 items up for sale with on average 3-5 photos.

The problem i am now facing is that i am being billed $1400+/month for BW overages and this in turn will max me out over the 25K threshold in no time, which is NOT GOOD!!!!!!

I have expressed my concern with the ISP and that something is amiss, either with the monitoring that was done before when we were on the shared server or NOW with the new dedicated server. They stated that since it is tracking directly on the switch, it is pretty hard to have that messed up....

Any one have any comments or suggestions?

What are some of your experiences with sites using this much bandwidth?

Lost in Bandwidth Land!!!!


Best Regards,