So the guy who has our server calls up friday and says that we have used over 350 gigs this month and the server is spewing out 50 megabytes per second. I'm like Holy effin shit Batman! Because there is no way that particular server should be using that much friggin bandwidth. It has some fairly low bandwidth sites and my domain is hosted on it. I check the logs and one domain that belongs to a friend of a friend who does the occasional tgp gallery is sucking an incredible amount of bandwidth. In fact it used 77 gigs that day cuz the guy didn't call until late so I didn't hear about it until the next day.
So then I'm trying to figure out what this guy is doing to use that kind of bandwidth. I figured he must be hosting movies or warez or something. It turns out that all that bandwidth was being sucked by ONE page on the Hun. Which seemed basically impossible until I took a look at the page. This guy used thumbnail pics that averaged over 32 KB in size. The thumbnails on my pages average 5 to maybe 8 KB. So we do the math.... 15 thumbs x 30 KB = 450 KB. Add about 50 KB or so for 2 banners and a couple of reciprocal banners and the html file itself. That means every time the page was loaded for the first time by a surfer it sucked 500 KB of bandwidth. There were 3 days with 90 to over 100,000 uniques. 100, 000 x 500Kb = 50 GB right? And that's before they even looked at a single big pic!
I ended up not shutting down the site cuz by the time I tracked it down the gallery was off the main page at the Hun's and the bandwidth was dropping. So in 5 days that one single gallery used 223 gigs of bandwidth. I don't know if he even got any signups out of the deal but it would surprise me a hell of a lot if he got enough to pay for that.
The moral of the story? Check the details! If he had looked at the size of the thumbs before posting that page he might have made some money instead of losing.
How to lose your ass... bigtime!
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