40Mb in a single day?

[BigDave]

Is this possible... My website has been growing steadily for 8 years and we currently serve about 2.2Mb a day, but today my site is offline and it has exceeded it's bandwidth limit as it appears it's delivered an astonishing 42Mb in a single day.

It's never happened before, and I don't think there could be any logical cause for it... There's nothing special on Pro9 today, so I'm guessing something "untoward" is happening - my problem is, I need to find out what it is before I pay for more bandwidth.

Any help?

[BigDave]

(Apparently those figures are actually GB, not Mb)!

Incredibly, after less 12 hours offline my site now reads "This Account Has Been Suspended Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible."

Nice! I was just hoping to determine why my site delivered nearly a months bandwidth in a single day before paying for more bandwidth, and now I'm locked out of the control panel because the account is suspended - talk about kicking you when you're down... I just need to be sure that I'm not going to be bleeding bandwidth at an extortionate rate the second I resume paying!

I'm on scl-vm-www09 by the way, anyone else experiencing anything similar?

[Richard]

It could just be something as innocent as lots of people all visiting your website at the same time. This can happen if your URL gets posted on a large message board or a popular news site for instance and millions of people all click the link at the same time. I had something like a 1000% increase in traffic for a couple of days once when my URL was posted on a popular forum a while back which took me close my monthly quota.

[BigDave]

Thanks for the reply Richard - nice to see some people still talk here!

I would love to believe that it was traffic like that as I have many little revenue streams on my site, but unfortunately non of the stats on the website or in the control panel seem to support this theory... I'd be only too happy to pay for genuine traffic as we get a handsome return on well targeted traffic - but I've a feeling there's something bent about this "ghost" traffic as my control panel has registered the bandwidth usage but none of the sources.

On a perhaps related note, has anyone else noticed their site disappearing offline for short periods of time (with an associated loss of access to control panel too) and then reappearing minutes later? I've mentioned that it "feels" like a server reset or something, but apparently the server has logged continuous up-time throughout the entire month???