My Bandwidth Is Getting Gobbled Up!

[creative-keyrings]

Hi Everyone,

Just like to say over the past week ive had to increase my bandwidth up to about 1.7gb and in the past couple of days its gone down to 600mb!

Now i dont know if this is a good thing or not, ive had a fair few extra sales so i guess its all good?

Regards,

Callum Slade

[DarrenC]

1.6GB start worrying when you hit 10GB! I've recently doubled up to 20GB on the server. Hitting a higher broadband, doesn't always necessary mean you are getting more traffic.

It could be a search engine bot intensively spidering your website - if your sales are up though it sounds more likely traffic has increased.

Don'tyou have any stats on traffic?

[Enigma121]

Callum,

Not all traffic is good for business. If you are getting a lot of traffic and few sales then either you may be attracting the wrong visitors, or it's time to have a critical look at your content.

Your conversion ratio is critical. What percentage of visits / page views turn into sales?

You should be looking to maximise this figure to get the most you can out of your bandwidth - it's a business resource like any other.

Your host / web designer should be able to give you statistics that help with this appraisal. If they can't it might be time to consider some changes...

[creative-keyrings]

I can get all the Cpanel statistics and it shows me where all my hits have been coming from and its a varied range from search engines to the ukbf.

[Enigma121]

I can get all the Cpanel statistics and it shows me where all my hits have been coming from and its a varied range from search engines to the ukbf.

OK, if you have search engine stats, which phrase comes from which engine? Which phrases are leading to a sale? (you might need to tie this in with follow up questions as part of your sales process).

[gary]

The other thing to look for is hijacking - this is another site using your images on their site without changing the path. It's quite common on forums and such like when someone adds an image they've seen on your site, and if it's a very busy forum, it's your bandwith that's being used to display the image each time.