Major Bandwidth Issues - Stats Attached

I have a Wordpress theme which has been running quite good for a while. For some reason, I am experiencing a giant increase in bandwidth. I haven’t installed any odd or intrusive plugins so I am quite perplexed on this.

I am hoping to start some dialogue on possibilities and solutions on this issue. I’ve tried blocking the IP’s but each one I block it seems 2 more pop up.

As you can see below, the files they are viewing and accessing are concerning.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

1 Like

What is it about those pages that someone might be after?

My guess is you’re pulling in some premium data “live” and others would rather scrape your site than to pay to get it from the provider.

that’s the odd thing, there really isn’t anything to pull or significant enough to want to pull from said pages. Would there be any other reason to want to access the site, for example, to merely create problems?

I have seen requests hunting for vulnerable plugins that I didn’t have, query variables trying to hack in to the site, attempts to hijack the contact form, and attempts to post comments on posts that were closed.
But I can’t think of any reason for a sharp increase in page views unless it might be that they got “promoted” somewhere by someone, Which wouldn’t be a bad thing (well, as long as it doesn’t cost you) even if it is a bit unusual, unexpected and unexplained.

Really appreciate your reply and feedback. That’s just the thing, it is costing me money as it’s a site that I host on a Hostgator reseller account. I’d really like to find a solution for controlling this. Again, I appreciate any insight and help.

Have you seen this thread? Blackhole trap for bad bots

The blackhole trap might be worth a try.

Thanks TechnoBear, I am going to work this in and test it. Hope it can really recognize the bots without blocking actual visitors.

I’ve had it on a couple of my sites for years and only ever had one “real” visitor blocked by it (as far as I know). It records details of blocked visitors and also e-mails them to you, so you can easily keep an eye out to see what’s being blocked.

Awesome. Any idea how good the wordpress plugin version works on this?

Sorry - I can’t help there, as I don’t use WordPress.

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.