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High Bandwidth usage alert on my cPanel hosting server

Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2016 11:35 am
by John Stanley
Hello,

One of my client reported that his website appears to be consuming more bandwidth than is expected. We have narrowed it down to most probably being related to bots/search engines causing the traffic. Can you help us to identify which bots/search engines are causing it and whether we can use a .htaccess file to block these traffic?

Re: High Bandwidth usage alert on my cPanel hosting server

Posted: Thu Oct 20, 2016 12:09 pm
by Aaron
cPanel has several built in statistic reports, one of the favored interface is Awstat on cPanel. The Awstats interface displays traffic statistics and details about the amount of people coming to your website.

To view AWStats traffic statistics for your website. Logon to cPanel account

Goto Cpanel Home> Metrics> Awstats

Click 'View' for the domain that you wish to view. A new interface will appear that displays the AWStats traffic statistics for that domain. There you can view the details about your website's visitors and also under 'Robots/Spiders visitors' section you can identify which bots/search engines are consuming more bandwidth usage.

You can block the bots/search engines which are causing high bandwidth usage with .htaccess rules.

Open the .htaccess page on you website's document root and add the below rules into it.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^YandexBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^SeznamBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^houzzbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^MJ12bot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Twitterbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Exabot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^AhrefsBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^XoviBot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^FakeUser
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>

You can specify the bots/search engines that you have identified on your Awstats interface like this.

Aaron N
Linux Support Engineer.
Nixtree Solutions
Managed Full Server Backups
https://www.nixtree.com/managed-backups.php
Follow us on : https://twitter.com/nixtree

Re: High Bandwidth usage alert on my cPanel hosting server

Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2016 6:10 pm
by Martin
Enable hotlink protection in cpanel - Some people might steal bandwidth by linking your images in their site so it is better to enable hotlink protection.

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Martin N
Linux Support Engineer.
Nixtree Solutions

Follow us on : https://twitter.com/nixtree-