Apache web server - CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 499 Monitoring
CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 499 Monitoring Bandwidth Bandwidth usage is another limit your hosting service will specify. Strictly speaking, bandwidth is the wrong term to use. Hosting companies usually restrict your monthly data transfer allowance; that is, they monitor how much data is transferred from your account each month. Unfortunately, the term bandwidth is so commonly used for this allowance that it has become the way to describe it. If you exceed the allowed bandwidth, several things may happen: The hosting company may shut down your site until the end of the month. The hosting company may allow your site to go over the limit but charge you for the excess (often an excessive amount). The hosting company may force you to upgrade your account to one with more bandwidth allowance. Most control panels provided by your hosting company have some way to monitor your bandwidth usage. Figure 18-8 shows one such example from the Plesk control panel (http:// www.sw-soft.com/en/products/plesk/). Figure 18-8. Plesk traffic report If your hosting service provides traffic statistics derived from your web server logs, those can be another way to monitor your traffic. Figure 18-9 shows a typical monthly chart from the Webalizer package (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/). From a chart like this, you can get a good idea of the growth of your traffic and look for trends that look like you might be exceeding your bandwidth allowance. Figure 18-10 shows another statistics report from the Webalizer package. This particular report shows the URLs that use the most bandwidth. In this example, you see that the third page in the list has managed to generate almost 1.3% of the traffic, despite having only 791 hits. Compare that to the first page in the list, which has of 22,000 hits for 7.4% of the traffic. In other words, that third file is using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth allowance. I investigated that post on my blog and saw that it has more than 530 comments, making it a huge, 400KB page. I can choose to address this issue in some way, perhaps by trimming the comments that are over a year old. Many statistics package provide reports like this that allow you to delve into the aggregated data from your server s web logs.
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