I'm a stupid noob. Please help.

[briman1970]

I don't know what is going on with my two sites, but all of a sudden I'm having to upgrade my bandwidth by several GBs and my sites are also going over their space limits as well.

I'm lost. I purchased both these sites a while back and I have no idea how to do anything to fix this stuff. I know how to go into FTP, look at file sizes and delete sh*t... that's about it. I deleted some backup files on the advice of my hosting company (PolurNet), but it was only a temporary fix. My site's file sizes are still going up and my bandwidth has increased dramatically, so something's going on.

It may be the forums on both sites. They are loaded with porn links and nonsense. Removing those may help. I've also needed to move Adsense to my account on one site (and make sure it's completely moved over properly on the other) for a long while now. I need to adjust some of the buttons on the header and fix some other minor details as well, but the bandwidth and site file size problems are the biggies.

Any advice? I need ideas. I need to know what it would cost to fix all this, or if I should give up and sell my sites as-is, or how to fix this myself, etc, etc.

My sites are www.Automobile-Book.com & www.LiveArcade.net btw. They are currently down. I've contacted PolurNet about a bigger plan. Hopefully they will get them back up soon.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[enlytend]

Have you been keepng current with updates on your forums? Were they configured securely to begin with? Is it possible the site(s) have been hacked?

Look at your log files and see if one or two IP's are making an unusual number of requests. That could be an intentional denial of service attack, and account for the bandwidth and subsequently your disk usage by creating massive log files (especially if you run awstats). If a handful of IP's are the problem, see who owns them and block them.

 

[briman1970]

Have you been keepng current with updates on your forums? Were they configured securely to begin with? Is it possible the site(s) have been hacked?

Look at your log files and see if one or two IP's are making an unusual number of requests. That could be an intentional denial of service attack, and account for the bandwidth and subsequently your disk usage by creating massive log files (especially if you run awstats). If a handful of IP's are the problem, see who owns them and block them.

Good info. Thanks. So I should just go into CPanel and look in AWStats for the IPs right? I'm going right now to take a look.

BTW, my sites are back up. The rep at PolurNet has told me I am up to 23GB on bandwidth! My two sites get about 3000 uniques per month each. Bandwidth shouldn't be that high should it!?

What about the hosting space getting bigger and bigger? What should I check to see what's going on there?

 

[whitebark]

Your pron forum is probably the culprit for the rise in disc use and bandwidth. Update the software it is running on and purge the database of all the bad posts. If you don't do it soon the search engines will start to frown on your websites.

 

[briman1970]

Your pron forum is probably the culprit for the rise in disc use and bandwidth. Update the software it is running on and purge the database of all the bad posts. If you don't do it soon the search engines will start to frown on your websites.

Thanks Whitebark. Is there an easy way to just kill the forums on each site? All that ever gets posted on them is porn and I don't have time to run a forum. Also, is there a way to direct all traffic that goes to the forums to another site, such as an affiliate link? I might as well use the traffic right... or am I not seeing the whole picture here?

BTW, I've just checked the IPs as enlytend suggested and there are about 7 different IPs that have used a total of 4.5GB of my bandwidth. The top two have used around 1GB each. Is it safe to list the IPs here or is there a way to track them?

 

[whitebark]

Thanks Whitebark. Is there an easy way to just kill the forums on each site? All that ever gets posted on them is porn and I don't have time to run a forum. Also, is there a way to direct all traffic that goes to the forums to another site, such as an affiliate link? I might as well use the traffic right... or am I not seeing the whole picture here?

BTW, I've just checked the IPs as enlytend suggested and there are about 7 different IPs that have used a total of 4.5GB of my bandwidth. The top two have used around 1GB each. Is it safe to list the IPs here or is there a way to track them?

To kill the forums you can remove the links to them from your other pages, and delete the files they run on.

To try to maximize the traffic you can use an htaccess 301 redirect. But I suspect the traffic will be mostly bots and low quality.
http://webmaster.iu.edu/tool_guide_info/redirect.shtml

You can also block those ip's as well from ever hitting your server again via htaccess:
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/userban/

 

[enlytend]

BTW, I've just checked the IPs as enlytend suggested and there are about 7 different IPs that have used a total of 4.5GB of my bandwidth. The top two have used around 1GB each. Is it safe to list the IPs here or is there a way to track them?

Either a reverse NSlookup (google it) or a standard whois client should show who owns the IP's.

 

[briman1970]

To kill the forums you can remove the links to them from your other pages, and delete the files they run on.

To try to maximize the traffic you can use an htaccess 301 redirect. But I suspect the traffic will be mostly bots and low quality.
http://webmaster.iu.edu/tool_guide_info/redirect.shtml

You can also block those ip's as well from ever hitting your server again via htaccess:
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/userban/

Thanks Roy. I don't really understand a lot of this. I REALLY don't want to ban valid traffic from my site and even with the info I'm getting, I still don't quite understand what I am looking at/for most of the time. How much would you charge me to backup my sites, then look at and edit a few things for me? If you don't have time, how much should I expect to pay for such work?

Either a reverse NSlookup (google it) or a standard whois client should show who owns the IP's.

Thanks Enlytend. I tried the reverse NSlookup, but I don't really understand the information it spits back at me. Here's one of the IPs (I've replaced the periods with " - "): 85 - 114 - 133 - 77

 

[enlytend]

German - Fastit dot net (one of their clients). Hostname is P077 dot purple dot fastwebserver dot de. A quick google check shows it to be a known forum-spamming address.

A look at your raw logs to see what they're doing may be interesting ... or you could just block them.

The only ones I'd be *worried* about blocking are things like Googlebot .

 

[SpareDomains]

What you are likely experiencing are bad bots that are basically on auto pilot and search out vulnerable forums and also websites which show a live recent referrals list or top list so they can spam their porn or viagra crap live on your site. The first thing you should do is upgrade your forum software to the most recent version and stay on top of it with future upgrades as these bots are always on the prowl looking for holes or eliminate the forum or upgrade to vbulletin or another forum software which may be more than you wish to spend but more secure in my opinion. After the forum is upgraded or removed you could set up a robots.txt file which asks robots to behave a certain way based on your command, the problem with a robots.txt file is that it is more like asking a bot to do something and a bad bot will not listen, creating a htaccess file is stronger and is not like asking but more of a direct rule and if a bot enters that you have banned you can send them off to a 404 error page or to another url, I would focus on learning how to recognize bad bots and how to write a good htaccess file which can ban bad bots based on bot name or ip address, the reason blocking by bot name is good is because a lot of bots rotate through a whole list of different ips, this is a demo I googled...
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess13.shtml
I generally don't use a pre-made list and prefer to block bots based on what I find visiting my own sites and ban them based on bad behavior, google and read all you can about htaccess, if you don't have the time to learn this then upgrade your hosting to more bandwidth or semi dedicated so you can afford the wasted bandwidth that they steal, I have written quite a few of these and the number of bad bots out there is at an all time high and they can waste some bandwidth depending on which ones are visiting your site as some are worse than others, until you can read up on htaccess and learn it I would delete the links to the forums from the front page and rename or delete the forums so they are not found which stops anymore porn being posted which should cut down your bandwidth usage as those forums are probably the main culprits.

 

[indowebber]

HI mate... Just want to asked more..are you have using VPS or still using shared host ?
And just want to give some input....

Some script have track and record some value such as search, and forum will be much eat of its. Some of my experience 2/5 database size have been increase on the search record. and yes! you absolutely use phpbb right ? http://www.automobile-book.com/car-care/

If you can use FTP i thing you can delete all files which have .php extensions in CACHE directory, becarefull! Dont delete index.htm on there.. run this query,

==============

#
# phpBB Backup Script
# Dump of tables for reserse_phpb1
#
# TABLE: phpbb_search_wordlist
#
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS phpbb_search_wordlist;
CREATE TABLE phpbb_search_wordlist(
	word_text varchar(50) NOT NULL,
	word_id mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
	word_common tinyint(1) unsigned NOT NULL, 
	PRIMARY KEY (word_text), 
	KEY word_id (word_id)
);
#
# TABLE: phpbb_search_wordmatch
#
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS phpbb_search_wordmatch;
CREATE TABLE phpbb_search_wordmatch(
	post_id mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL,
	word_id mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL,
	title_match tinyint(1) NOT NULL, 
	KEY post_id (post_id), 
	KEY word_id (word_id)
);

and like other said, better if you have upgrade the forum page if you want to still running it. Use SEO PHPbb very catchy system IMO Or buy VB licensed

And about some IP that would be leeching your boards, i thing better to redirect some of them to another page... another service website that you own such as porn site maybe :P. Why ? because im sure spammer will dont like to buy from your affiliate page... lolz...

 

[weblord]

take a look at this
http://www.automobile-book.com/car-care/

We have 14727 registered users

and you have 33680 topics on the general discussion forum
i think that forum have to go.

 

[indowebber]

i guess you dont have see this one Weblord
http://www.automobile-book.com/car-care/viewforum.php?f=5&sid=aac603a8187f4b1835276abde64ecbe5
There a huge spammer there

anyway the best things is just block email extension... guess most of user using *@domain.ru :imho:

 

[weblord]

verification/captcha system on the registration and to be verified by admin is good as well in minimizing these fake signups.
thanks for the headsup umat_gila

 

[Tippy]

I'd dump the forum asap... I dont know what you pay for hosting but Ive been with GatorHost for a year now and havnt had any probs what so ever with them, they give you loads of space and bandwith for like $8/mth plus you can host unlimited domains/sites as well. They will move your sites free of charge so you wouldnt have to worry about that part wish to me is the worst thing with changing hosts.

This month Ive used 30gb of space and 247gb of bandwith without a glitch or problem.

Mike

 

[indowebber]

Oghh yes... some host also will provide some problem like you have over know... as i know, host monster and bluehost will support to you...

 

[Keral_Patel]

You can see which site is using what amount of bandwidth. After seeing that you can also check which file is accessed most of the times. You can easily spot bots activity on it in comparison of the other files.

 

[briman1970]

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. Rep has been left for all! I still need someone to do the following on my sites...

Delete the forums on both sites.
Redirect all forum traffic to my AdultFriendFinder affiliate site.
Check to make sure my Adsense is setup properly on both sites.
Help me figure out how to setup affiliate banners on the LiveArcade site.
Some other small link tweaks.

Anyone know how much can I expect to pay for all this?

 

[Keral_Patel]

I think for $50 all the above things could be solved here and there.

It will be enough to get the above mentioned things done.

Thanks.

 

[useless]

just delete the forums and u r on ur way....