My blog was down for awhile coz it exceeded the 8GB bandwidth. I’m quite sure it was the doing of spam bots as I receive tons of spam comments and all my pictures and embedded videos are hosted elsewhere. As much as I like the sound of thousands of page views, I prefer if actual people are reading and not spam bots.
I had to upgrade my plan coz of this problem. Not that I really wanted to in the first place…boooo…
Any idea how to prevent them from even visiting my site?
Hi Elisia,
I’m sorry to hear about all the spambots. One thing you can do to stop them from even visiting is to add some lines to your .htaccess file in the root of your website, and it will prevent most (99%) of them from visiting your site at all, saving you a lot in bandwidth cost. Email me and I’ll send you some code you can use.
Something else I noticed…you’re using both WP-SpamFree and WP-SpamShield. Too funny…I’m the author of both. WP-SpamFree is an older version, and was picked up by another developer 4 years ago. I hasn’t been truly updated since then, and runs much more slowly. If I could offer advice to only use one or the other, that would probably make your site faster and cut down on the server load as well. (WP-SpamShield uses about 1/20 the server load of WP-SpamFree.) Unfortunately there is no benefit to using both. There is a plugin called P3 Plugin Profiler…if you use that you can see which plugins use the most bandwidth. Also installing a cache plugin like WP Super Cache will further reduce the server load (and bandwidth).
I hope that helps. Feel free to email me with any questions.
– Scott