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Bandwidth usage

Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2026 11:27 am
by skater
Hi, all. I got hit with a bill from the website provider for excessive bandwidth usage.

I don't think it's anything anyone is doing specifically on B190.com that's causing it, but I've implemented file size limits in both posts and the gallery: 5 megabytes. Please please please try to keep your pictures smaller than that - reduce quality or size, etc.

I'm investigating the jump in usage, but it's pretty wild - up through December 16, the website used 10-15 gb/day. Then on the 17th, it jumped to over 70 gb/day, and it didn't fall below 80 gb for the rest of the month. In fact it has already used a ton of this month's allocation. See the graph below.
December bandwiddth usage.png
My guess is bots are coming in and slurping everything up, probably for AI purposes. Larger pictures mean more bandwidth usage. This wasn't an issue before with a low traffic site, but something has changed to suddenly pull a bunch more hits on the site.

Re: Bandwidth usage

Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2026 1:00 pm
by skater
Oh, I found it. The bots are sucking down all of the attachments (images attached to messages, not the gallery). I've now made it so that you have to be logged in to see the images.

Sorry, everyone. Not what I wanted to do. But I can't spend several hundred dollars a month to make some AI bots happy.

Re: Bandwidth usage

Posted: Fri Jan 02, 2026 7:29 pm
by Mlong
It's probably me just checking to see if anyone want to buy my B190.

Re: Bandwidth usage

Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2026 5:05 pm
by skater
Mlong wrote: Fri Jan 02, 2026 7:29 pm It's probably me just checking to see if anyone want to buy my B190.
LOL definitely not, AI bots - in particular OpenAI's ChatGPT, were slamming the site.

I now have a reverse proxy set up and hopefully we won't have any more problems.

Sorry I had to pull the site while you're trying to sell. :(

Re: Bandwidth usage

Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2026 1:44 pm
by Mlong
No, problem. I am glad you were able to figure all that out. It is a foreign language to me.