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I have a dedicated windows 2008 server and with Allocated monthly traffic: 1500GB, the hosting company sent me "Please take note that the allocated traffic included with your Budget (calculated by GB of traffic) has been exceeded. You will be billed for the exceeding traffic at the end of the month according to the per GB exceeding traffic fee specified on your contract."

I checked my Google analytics account and didn't find any big different for the websites traffic this month than previous months.

I just want to understand what may cause this sudden increase in traffic this month?

may be ftp access? remoting to webserver too much time? or what may cause this?

Also, is there any tool in the server to know where the traffic went?

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If you normally don't go anywhere near your monthly traffic limit, the chances are the machine is chock full of bots and causing havoc all 'round the tubes. If you don't know what your baseline traffic is like, you should be able to get your regular monthly usage stats from your provider. If your provider is any good, they should also have detailed traffic analysis available for your server, to give you an idea of where the traffic is going to. We provide it for all our customers. I don't know of anything built-in to Windows that gives you the same info.

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  • womble is right, if not on the immediate assumption that your machine is infected (showing an obvious bias :P ), but on the point that your provider should be able to give you stats of some kind. Being able to judge against real historical trends is your first requirement. Second is determining wtf is going on - and a good gauge will be knowing if the increase is in inbound or outbound. This route is far better than asking people without direct knowledge to guess the causes, of which there could be very many. Nov 22, 2009 at 11:17
  • Hey, I assume that Linux boxes with sudden, otherwise unexplained traffic spikes are bot-ridden as well. I'm an equal opportunity hater.
    – womble
    Nov 22, 2009 at 11:42
  • I tend to assume that linux boxes with this problem are going to turn out to be warez dumps. Oct 20, 2010 at 0:53
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There are a variety of possible causes and I'm afraid you're going to have to do some digging to find out.

The most common causes are: - web dev has uploaded large flash or image file(s) - web dev has uploaded active content which continually accesses site from browsers - site has been exploited/compromised

My first port of call would be to ask your webhost to give you the URL to site traffic reports. This will tell you the raw traffic usage on the site. Google Analytics probably won't be much help here as it only tells you about human visitors, which doesn't help distinguish between the above three causes; you need raw stats for this.

If you can't get stats, go through your site with a fine tooth comb to eliminate #1 or #3 above. And/or change to a host who can give you stats, which are frankly vital to the management of your site. Most hosts have a control panel of some sort which usually allows you access to detailed stats.

Unless you need Windows-based webhosting you should consider moving to Linux based hosting; it's more stable and much cheaper for that reason. Of course, if you have significant ASP-based code on your site, you'll need to stay Windows based.

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