Do not understand a jump in bandwidth consumption

Support
1

Hi,

I have an academic website. I have no fancy functionalities on this website: just some web pages, some pdf files, and some HTML files.

The website is now public, but I have not yet publicized it next to my students or community. So I believe the number of visitors has been very low since its creation (24th August).

However, my bandwidth usage suddenly jumped from a relatively stable 650MB to 2GB. I do not understand how this is possible, as I only tested the links to 20 pdf files (an average of 20000 KB per pdf file), besides making minor changes to the webpages.

Finally, I doubt what counts for bandwidth. I will have around 400 students this semester. I expect that, on average, there will be about 1,600 visits to the website every month and about 2.5 GB of the downloaded material. What else counts for bandwidth? With this information, will the limit of 100GB bandwidth be expected to be overcome?

Thanks

2

Hello @figo, In order for you to actually figure out why the sudden jump in bandwidth, if possible create a clone of the website and then monitor it’s bandwidth as well.

There could be so many reasons why the bandwidth suddenly increased. Its possible someone is downloading the content on the website since you stated it has pdf files.

Kindly give feedback on your findings.
Thanks

4

Hey there, @figo :wave:

Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Netlify Forums. I have done some digging, and it looks like the spike in bandwidth on your account occurred August 27th and August 30th. The specific files using high bites in bandwidth all appear to be PDFs on your site. A likely explanation is that site visitors are downloading your PDFs.

Every time someone clicks on one of these links, bandwidth is used. For example, let’s your PDF is 10MB. If a visitor clicks on the PDF link and then cancels the download at 1 MB-- the canceled download will still count as 1 MB of bandwidth used on your account.

Our Pro Plan offers 10x more bandwidth than our starter plan. You can read about that on our pricing page. Conversely, one workaround would be hosting your PDFs on a separate cloud service and providing the link to your students.

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