I had a disturbing email yesterday: The domain aaziz.org (aaziz) is about to exceed its bandwidth limit. I only get about 300K traffic any given month – and that’s only lately. What the hell happened.

Well, I found out. Looked through the access logs and Webalizer reports, and found out a SHIT TON of traffic (97%!) were the six pictures we took for the meatcard contest. They were over 2.2 MB in size each. Oops. I also noticed a few more peculiar things, for one, that 68% of referrers were that exact blog post, but the actual blog files weren’t getting a lot of hits. I also only accumulated $0.02 in ad revenue that whole day, so I don’t think it’s actually been a lot of traffic. I’m thinking perhaps a crawler or spam bot or something.

I really don’t have a lot of experience as a web admin, so I don’t know. I’m going to have to keep an eye on it and possibly move the images off-site if it gets bad. I reduced them to 400k each, so I’m hoping that 80% reduction will help. I don’t think it’s hotlinking, as I added hotlink blocking last night and it didn’t do anything. Well, we’ll see. It was only an extra $1 for an additional 2GB this month, so not that big of a deal.