Does this seem normal?

[Tyler]

I've been notified from my dedicated server provider, ServerMatrix (The Planet), that I'm on the road to surpass my monthly allotted bandwidth of 1500 gigs.

I have two dedicated servers:

http://www.tylercruz.com/uploaded_images/7-702689.jpg

Now, here are the server bandwidth usages:

http://www.merendi.com/bandwidth_october.jpg
http://www.merendi.com/bandwidth_september.jpg

September only had a total of nearly 1000 gigs, and I looked back at the previous months, and those were roughly around the same as September as well.

What makes me very confused is that when I log into Urchin and do a total tally of all of my websites, I find September totaling 46 gigs and October so far 10! How come so low? I know nothing about server administration - could something else be 'hogging' my bandwidth other than Apache?

The only thing I can think of is if a past person I hired still has access to my server and is leeching WareZ or something.. how can I check this? I really know nothing about server administration.

I contacted tech support, inquiring on bandwidth increase prices, and was surprised to find them so expensive:

500GB for $125/mo
750GB for $150/mo
1000GB for $175/mo

This is so confusing to me - that's more than buying a brand new server and getting 1500 GBs! Are these normal prices?

I haven't asked yet, but will, on how much the overage costs are per Gig. Does anyone have any ideas? What's horrible is that support says that if I ordered it now, it wouldn't count until NEXT month.. so like.. um.. how am I supposed to stop all this bandwidth then? Shut down all my sites?!?

Thanks in advance!

[Tyler]

Apparantly my 'friend' who I had often hired to program or do server work for me, has whored it up with tons of torrents, WareZ, shoutcast, etc. That explains the bandwidth usage...

So the good news is that we solved the root of the bandwidth problem and fixed it.. the bad news is that it's somebody I've worked with closely for a long time, and I'm waiting for him to finish a site I paid him to do.. which I'm wondering if I'll even get back now; I can't get in contact with him...

[kRs0n3]

back in the day, i used to leech warez from anonymous login ftp sites from around the world.

these hackers are smart dudes, able to hide directories that most admins couldn't find, and when they could, couldn't be deleted!

i'll never forget the time i logged into a server to grab some ps2 games, and it turned out to be symantec's ftp site; the same place where you would download updates to your norton internet security & a-v software!:rolleyes:

needless to say, i have no faith at all in Norton products.

[Tyler]

Yeah, back in the say I used to play all of those 'hacking challenge' sites, if you've ever played or heard about them. I reached the highest level in Arcanum, level 10 I believe. Got to Kernal (level 7) on Cyberarmy, and beat another site, I forget the name of it now.

They were extremely fun, and you weren't doing anything malicious at all since the sites were made to be backed... but it was much more fun when I was 17 or so and when the Internet was a bit more 'oldschool' :)

Haven't done any of that stuff for years now. I forget it all, too! :(

[Vince]

Apparantly my 'friend' who I had often hired to program or do server work for me, has whored it up with tons of torrents, WareZ, shoutcast, etc. That explains the bandwidth usage...
This always happens.
I just took over managing a server from some guy who had setup 20 of his own sites on there, and was even *selling* hosting on a server that doesn't belong to him. What an asshole.

[Submerge]

Ouch man. Personally, I try to avoid hosting any media on my websites. They bring in too much bandwidth usage with very little pay off. Also, I always check to make sure everything not suppose to be on the box isn't on it. Helps to maintain yourself sometimes.

[netfreehost]

You should keep an eye on bandwidth usage. Hacking and p2p can use up too much bandwidth and most data center charge too much for bandwidth overage.

Once my server got hacked and use for sharing files over p2p. Luckily i checked by bandwidth usage and found its too high and fixed the problem. Still i get a small bill for bandwidth overage, if i do not find it time, it can go big.

[Submerge]

That's a good reason to do daily backups, in case a hosting company pulls that on you, you can just go somewhere else.