ok, before i dive into what has been happening, I want to say that otehr then some simple html, and basic dreamweaver functions I know nothing to very little about php, java, scripts, etc... so if I dont understand something please bear with me, I grasp concepts fairly quickly and with php it's always been trial and error with me.
Now... I uploaded b2evo this past march and started really unsing it in May, (my blog was a basic site about me, promoting some of my freinds shows, bands, and me bitching about certain aspects of life in NYC) as I started posting on my blog, the traffic started to increase, which would normally be good, but the traffic (refers) I was getting were mostly coming from casino sites, porn sites, and prescription med sites, with many domain extensions coming from Niue (.nu), others popular refers were from Russia, Mexico and Brasil. Most of the poeple that I know who would come to my website tend to be stateside, with a small minority withing the EU25.
At first this wasn't really a problem as these refers were limited, but over the past two months they grew exponentially and somehow started eating up my bandwith. The entire blog including all pics that I uploaded could not have been more then 10MB and by yesterday my host informed me that I ran through 5GB of bandwith which I am allowed a month, I find a bit prepostrous.
So my question is, why does / did this happen. Other then a few pictures of me and some friends I didn't have anything else that would make people inclined to hotlink to. I didn't subit my site to any fishy listings, yet from the get go (as soon as I installed b2evo) I was getting these porn refers. My website's address is www.eljacek.info which has never been anything else but my personal website.
I must say that I'm somewhat anal about the security on my machine at home, and would like to learn how to protect my websites from this type of onslaught. my host told me something about the .httaccess file, but when I looked into it, it was all pretty much greek to me (no offence to the hellenics on this site, it's just an expression).
anyways, I took the entire site down as it was generating anywhere fomr 400MB to 750MB of bandwith usage a day just before I passed the limit.
Thanks for your help
- Jamigre
General Support
b2evolution CMS Support Forums
Yeah, this is a problem that we're all facing. There are some possible solutions proposed here:
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4512&highlight=antispam+bandwidth
It's possilbe to use the antispam blacklist to generate an .htaccess file with rules that deny traffic from known spammers. As it is, the blacklist doesn't log or display referrals from known spammers (if you keep it updated), but the spammer still views your site, which eats up a little bit of bandwidth for each hit. You can use .htaccess to stop them from using any bandwidth. Read through that thread to see how it works and what to do. If it all looks to complicated, then you could wait for the next vesion of b2evolution, which is due out before september 20. I think it will address this issue.