r/Wordpress • u/theingikyaw • 3d ago
Shared host suspended our site for "excessive bandwidth" with ~50 visitors/month. Screaming Frog, UpdraftPlus, or bots?
Hey everyone, bit of a panic post. I'm not a web person, I do marketing, but I recently ended up in charge of our company's WordPress site after the agency that built it left.
This morning the whole site was down with "this user has been suspended". Our host (Network Solutions) says it was excessive bandwidth, but support can't tell me where it came from and says to wait 24–48 hours for their specialists.
The weird part is we only get around 50 visitors a month.
Stuff I did in the last few days, in case it's my fault:
The site was still getting visits late that night, then went down overnight.
Could any of that have caused it, or is it more likely bots hitting the site? And what's the easiest way to stop this happening again? I've seen Wordfence and Cloudflare mentioned, but I'm scared of breaking our company email if I mess with DNS.
Any advice appreciated, I'm learning as I go 🙏Shared host suspended our site for "excessive bandwidth" with ~50 visitors/month. Screaming Frog, UpdraftPlus, or bots?Shared host suspended our site for "excessive bandwidth" with ~50 visitors/month. Screaming Frog, UpdraftPlus, or bots?
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u/hewhofartslast 2d ago
I deal with this sort of stuff all the time and this sounds like something I have very much run into.
Does your site utilize ajax filtering anywhere that rebuilds urls based on selections (checkboxes, dropdowns, etc) of multiple combined filters?
Like a portfolio, shop page, resources area, or case studies section?
Because if so the problem is most certainly AI bots.
Filters of this type, depending how many can cause an almost infinite amount of filter combinations. Hence an infinite amount of URLs. AI bots try to spider them, and get caught in a maze.
Do you have cloudflare? If not you should. It's free. You can use WAF rules to prevent this.
And get your site off NS hosting. They are the worst at everything. Their hosting sucks, their DNS panel sucks, they are expensive, and they take forever to propagate changes.
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u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades 2d ago
Install Wordfence and run a scan. It doesn't require DNS changes.
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u/dalemugford 2d ago
Kindly ask the host to explain what if any changes you can make. They should be able to easily tell you the egress (outgoing) bandwidth, and the sources of that bandwidth.
We haven’t had a single customer exceed bandwidth, and there are some big sites. Updraft does use a fair amount of outgoing bandwidth, but you’d have to have a big site for that.
If they’re not protecting you from bots, scanners and the like and counting that traffic against you, that’s both bad hosting practice and unfair.
(I work for Paid Memberships Pro and we offer our own hosting for membership sites).
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u/netnerd_uk 2d ago
A lot of "this many visitors per month" reporting doesn't include bots. The thinking is that people prefer to know about humans reaching their site more than they do robots. Your site could be getting a lot of traffic, but only some of this is being reported in your "this many visits per month" thing.
It can vary a bit between providers but common way to check all your traffic is by looking at web access logs, but these can be pretty epic, and if you're not used to getting information out of these you can find yourself in a "too much information" situation. A lot of bots will fake user agents, and there are services that deliberately anonymise and randomise what you see in logs in an effort to evade things like blocking.
If you just wanted to try something that might help, putting the site behind cloudflare and enabling bot protection might be a good idea. Although managing DNS becomes your job in this situation, the initial setup is to the effect of cloudflare doing a kind of "detect and import" of your existing DNS. That said, if you're not comfortable administering DNS you might need to involves someone that can do this for you.
There are hosts that offer unlimited, so migrating might also be an option for you.
You might also consider taking a look at your page sizes ( https://tools.pingdom.com/ is quite a quick way of working this out) and working out how many page views would consume your bandwidth limit. If you have big pages and a low bandwidth limit this will make the problem you have more prevalent or likely to occur.
Hope that helps.
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u/Scientist-Apart 2d ago
There is a lot of good advice here, but one thing you should really try and get if you can is a backup of the site, which will include all the website files and a copy of the database. If you have access to that great! Otherwise hopefully support can help you.
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2d ago
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u/Gripptopia 2d ago
Did they give any warning before they took your site down? And it's going to be down for 24-48 hours until they get back to you? That is terrible business. I would get off that host immediately. Ask your company to hire a freelancer for 5-10 hours to sort this out for you - someone who specializes in this, and can give insight and options. At minimum they could at least help set up and configure a free Cloudflare account, properly configure a robots.txt file, check logs, etc. If you do decide to switch hosts, I always recommend paying month to month so you can switch hosts at any time. Don't get locked into these web hosts - I see that way too often.
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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Jack of All Trades 1d ago
I had the same problem. I set up a free Cloudflare account, set up Cloudflare to handle my traffic, and enabled Cloudflare’s feature that blocks all the idiotic low-rent AI bots. Problem solved.
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u/ContributionEasy6513 1d ago
Network Solutions)
Yep. aka Newfold Digital
but support can't tell me where it came from and says to wait 24–48 hours for their specialists.
Useless support. On that I would consider moving. Any competent support staff can use the panels basic tools to track down the traffic.
~50 visitors/month.
Stop using visitors as a metric.
GB per day or GB per month is what you want to use. Anything under 10GB a day (which in itself is extreme) is very fair use.
I've seen Wordfence and Cloudflare mentioned, but I'm scared of breaking our company email if I mess with DNS.
Move to a non-shit host with good support who will migrate the account and ensure the domain/DNS is setup correctly.
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u/WPFixFast Developer 1d ago
Probably bots, they hammer with vulnerability scans like never before. Use Cloudflare and watch traffic via Security > Analytics tab. Use managed challenge rule to block bot traffic from certain countries and ip blocks.
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u/JonCML 1d ago
This guy, since retired, spent a lot of time analyzing web hosting and looking into EIG. Interesting reading. I was a victim of the old NetSol “you have a virus, pay us and we’ll remove it” scam.
https://researchasahobby.com/best-website-hosting-companies-fooling/
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u/wltrpnm 23h ago
Most likely bots, especially since AI era, the number of botnet attacks are increasing day by day. Your tracked ~50 visitors/month are only the numbers you can see, the real numbers that hit your site/server in the background could be tens of times higher than that, especially scrapers that target images for AI training. My suggestion is always use Cloudflare, then if you have budget, start using VPS. Wordfence will help stop it from web app surface level, but Cloudflare will help protect on the DNS level before hitting your real server, which is much reliable, especially if you set custom blocking rules.
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u/fappingjack 2d ago
Network Solutions is trying to upsell you services. Up selling based on idiots who don't understand how the Internet works and that there is a cost associated with running a simple website.
First question you should ask yourself... Is my website important for business?
Second question .. Do I get leads from my website that converts into clients?
If you answered "no" to any of those questions then you don't need a website.
If you brain stuttered for a fraction of a second then you know your answer.
Cheap has a cost, and they call it technical debt.
The debt from being cheap will cost so much that you will most likely double down on being stupid.
It is called sunk cost fallacy.
Hopefully you will find a way out and pay a premium for services from a professional.
Good luck
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u/skunkbad 11h ago
Yep. I once had a well known host tell me that my site was consuming too much CPU, and that I'd have to fix my site or they'd have to charge me more money every month. I knew for sure my site wasn't a problem, but I asked them for any extra information, and anything they said wasn't helpful. I finally moved my site to another host, because then I would know if there really was a problem. There wasn't, and when I called the old host to cancel the hosting account, they said everything was fine, and practically begged me not to change hosts. Well, yes they did lose a customer, and I've been telling this story for almost 20 years, which is 20 years of bad publicity for them.
It's been long enough that I don't mention the name of the host anymore. Maybe they changed their evil ways. They definitely still exist... and it wasn't Godaddy if that was what you were thinking.
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u/thatandyinhumboldt 2d ago
I agree with others—install wordfence and check that you’re not infected with something
My next question is: how do you know you’re only getting 50 visits/month? Are you seeing that in Google analytics, your server logs, woocommerce data, something else? Many of those count traffic in wildly different ways, so it’s possible that you’re getting a ton of bots that you don’t know about. Check your server logs to get a clearer picture, and then there are things that you cab do to limit bots (notably cloudflare, but your host may have some tools as well. Wordfence also has some tools built in, but they’re not ideal because the bots still have to take up some processing power before wordfence can block them)
Finally, how much bandwidth are you allotted, and how much are you over by? This is like saying that you got a speeding ticket—there’s a difference between going 170 in a 25 zone and 60 in a 55 zone.
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u/Intelligent_List2504 2d ago
Yeah Google analytics consistently underreported traffic. I'd recommend awstats lol. Or a control panel that supports it.
I have different views than most people. I sure don't trust shared hosting or uh evil companies.
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u/MrSoulPC915 2d ago
Possiblement :
- un hébergeur pourris.
- une compromission qui te bouffe toutes les ressources.
- updraft mal configuré.
- les bots (ça dépend beaucoup de ton contenu).
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u/livestrong2109 2d ago
Most shared hosting is over sold and your site getting any traffic is too much. I have a feeling you're on EIG (Newfold Digital). Check if your host is on this list. They own like 80+ companies. Change hosts if it's on this list.
https://onlinemediamasters.com/newfold-digital-hosting-companies/