Managing Bandwidth (23rd April 2008)
People would search for car names and screenshots of mods on Project Cerbera would show up. They would click these, despite not really wanting to install a GTA mod.
Inbound traffic is dominated by image searches. Here’s what I got from AWstats today:
| Site | Page Views | |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Google (Images) | 479,203 |
| 46,617 | ||
| Yahoo! | 2,323 | |
| Windows Live | 1,608 | |
| MSN Search | 1,149 | |
| Unknown search engines | 614 | |
| AOL | 482 | |
| Google (cache) | 433 | |
alice.it | 421 | |
| Ask | 78 | |
| 2006 | Google (Images) | 703,812 |
| 30,715 | ||
| MSN Search | 3,873 | |
| Yahoo! | 3,415 | |
| Unknown search engines | 926 | |
| AltaVista | 508 | |
| Baidu | 342 | |
| AOL | 269 | |
| AOL (de) | 187 | |
| Netscape | 124 | |
| 2005 | Google (Images) | 420,138 |
| 28,168 | ||
| Yahoo! | 1,656 | |
| MSN Search | 960 | |
| AOL | 657 | |
| Unknown search engines | 483 | |
| AltaVista | 482 | |
| AOL (de) | 265 | |
| Netscape | 180 | |
| Baidu | 170 | |
| 2004 | Google (Images) | 75,589 |
| 4,368 | ||
| Yahoo! | 345 | |
| AOL | 185 | |
| Unknown search engines | 159 | |
| Ask | 100 | |
| AOL (de) | 77 | |
| Virgilio | 67 | |
| MSN Search | 63 | |
| Netscape | 56 |
Today I got a 509 Bandwidth Exceeded message when trying to access the site. Checked my inbox and there was the e-mail confirming this. Chatted with Dave Bateman, my ever-friendly host. Decided to remove the site from Google Images.
Simple to do. Just added this to the bottom of my robots.txt file:
# Google Image Searches (2008-04-23)
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
After a month or two we’ll see what effect this has.
Update (Monday 23rd June 2008)
When viewing my stats in June 2008, nothing had changed. So I moved that entry from the bottom of my file to be the 2nd entry; the first Disallow rule. The exact code:
# Google Image Searches (2008-04-23, moved up from bottom of file on 2008-06-23)
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /
Time to sit and wait again.
Update (Friday 21st November 2008)
It worked! Bandwidth use per month dropped from 27GB in June 2008 to 12GB in July 2008. It’s been falling by about 1GB per month since then, reaching 7.5GB in October 2008.
Coincidence? The referrer stats say otherwise:
| Site | Page Views | |
|---|---|---|
| May 2008 | Google (Images) | 186,808 |
(No Referer) | 27,725 | |
| 23,141 | ||
| June 2008 | Google (Images) | 150,979 |
(No Referer) | 31,505 | |
| 19,985 | ||
| July 2008 | Google (Images) | 21,817 |
| 16,972 | ||
(No Referer) | 16,033 | |
| October 2008 | 13,633 | |
(No Referer) | 11,682 | |
| Google (Images) | 9,057 |
Now my site is using a much more reasonable amount of my host’s resources. Phew!