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Scary Traffic Levels


Creative Commons License photo credit: pbo31

I recieved an e-mail from PlusNet the other day informing me that my site had exceeded it’s traffic allocation.

I should have known better, I had not even investigated what the limit was until that point!

It turns out that Plus Net give you 250Mb/Day.

Fairly generous thinks I, using the stats generated by the WordPress plugin, I am averaging about 40 visits per day, 181 is my best day ever. Using the WordPress stats it was quite difficult to see where the usage had come from. It was then that I remembered that PlusNet give you access to Webalizer statistics as part of the hosting.

The day in question was the 3rd of April.

WordPress told me 34 views

Webaliser told me:

Hits : 8900
Files : 8400
Pages : 7800
Visits : 330
Sites : 118
Meg : 392 !!!

So, question 1, why the big discrepancy between the WordPress stats and the Webaliser stats?

Question 2, which is correct?

The good thing about the webaliser stats is that they allow be to look in detail at how my site is being accessed and where from.

It turns out that the problem lay in 2 visitors from Greece who in two visits send 10000 hits and downloaded 469 Mb from my site.

The page generating the traffic was my Photos page, here I link to all of the Flickr photos and the groups that I access. I can only presume that one of the groups had a “large” photo on their page, which was then mapped onto my page.

For the moment I have removed my group photos from the page to appease PlusNet.

I’ll now have to keep an eye on both sets of stats and see which I believe most.

One reply on “Scary Traffic Levels”

Hi Ross,

This blog was highlighted to me so I thought I’d come across and see if I could help.

The answers to the 2 questions you’ve asked aren’t something I’ll be able to answer TBH, however I do have a suggestion to help out. We can activate raw weblogs on your domain address which will allow you to compare this against the webaliser and the wordpress stats to check which are accurate. I know this has some potential to add to the confusion with a 3rd set of stats being present, but it should help to pin down why and where from you are getting so many hits.

If you want raw weblogs activating you can just raise a ticket through the help and support section, or if you reply to the thread on our community site forums asking for this I’ll pick it up for you.

Regards,

Chris Parr
PlusNet Comms Team

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