Outrages Bandwidth consumption

[Go Live]

We relocated to 3dcart the 1st of the year. picked a plan that was bigger then our needs. The standard plus seemed to fit according to the traffic estimates provided by 3dcart. We have had to upgrade weekly.

Our Biggest month is December with 3gig at our last cart for the entire month. We are now going on 30gig with only 1/4 of the sales. I believe we have a serious problem here as the stats that we are being charged are not consistent with our traffic. Our traffic went from 300 to 900 visitors a day the very first day we opened the doors here. While I should be impressed with the visitor count I am not as sales have not gone up with this number, they have gone down and we have not added any new product feeds or adwords campaigns.

Smarter stats

Day Page Views Visits Hits Bandwidth(KB)
1/19/2011 17,550 882 42,121 513,271
1/20/2011 24,234 865 46,931 582,013
1/21/2011 25,326 1,022 48,629 645,316
1/22/2011 20,673 851 44,928 678,951
1/23/2011 58,292 1,611 103,783 1,469,077
1/24/2011 25,457 1,090 57,426 709,675
1/25/2011 15,186 930 36,820 461,685


admin reports

Date Bandwidth (MB)
1/19/2011 1,291.00
1/20/2011 1,461.00
1/21/2011 1,711.00
1/22/2011 1,546.00
1/23/2011 1,981.00
1/24/2011 1,426.00
1/25/2011 1,526.00

The smarter stats reflects the numbers I am use to for bandwidth the last 2 years. While the admin visit count was fairly accurate till things went terrible wrong on the 15th and at the same time the chat tracker went south as well.
Of course support claims there stats are 100% accurate.

Day Visitors Hits
1/1/2011 265 1276
1/2/2011 323 1717
1/3/2011 393 1993
1/4/2011 407 1576
1/5/2011 377 1463
1/6/2011 386 1391
1/7/2011 400 1182
1/8/2011 384 1527
1/9/2011 364 1168
1/10/2011 406 1190
1/11/2011 321 1326
1/12/2011 361 1305
1/13/2011 268 1160
1/14/2011 173 978
1/15/2011 5 20
1/16/2011 4 11
1/17/2011 3 4
1/18/2011 10 48
1/19/2011 9 36
1/20/2011 8 9
1/21/2011 5 21
1/22/2011 3 6
1/23/2011 10 33
1/24/2011 5 20
1/25/2011 3 14

The numbers in the admin I must have offset when I changed the reward points multiplier. Any of you fellow users know how to fix this it seems we are drowning fast.

[cekman]

If you search the threads you'll see this is an on-going complaint. If the topic gets too 'hot' the threads get shut down.

Hopefully THIS time support will discover a problem, but few ever see any resolution that I know of.

Support will just tell you that many different things impact bandwidth, yada- yada- yada.

I am convinced that my bandwidth usage is over-stated also - and had to increase my plan because of it. My Hard Disk Usage and Database usage graphs are barely visible - but my bandwidth nearly maxes out every month. Even if I'm 'closed' for part of the month. Luckily for me I am staying JUST under overusage. But I feel I'm already on a plan way bigger than I need.

If you get any good proof or answers I would love to see them. I gave up on the topic well over a year ago.

[cekman]

The numbers in the admin I must have offset when I changed the reward points multiplier. Any of you fellow users know how to fix this it seems we are drowning fast.

I'm not followoing what you're saying here??

[Burnspot]

This wouldn't be the first shopping cart to have bandwidth tracking issues unfortunately. I know of at least one other cart that has acknowledged an ongoing issue with accuracy; in their case, they quit tracking it until they could figure out what was going on.

Hopefully, they'll sort it out.

I have seen a few bandwidth sucking bots hitting our site...there's one that likes to fill the cart with several thousand dollars worth of items about 7-8 times in succession before leaving the site (out of Seattle...name escapes me at the moment). There's a few others that pull images constantly (inserted some blocks via the .htaccess & robots.txt files after that).

Might look into that Cloudflare service...it's mentioned in these forums.

[Go Live]

The rewards point multiplier is just one of the things we were looking into in an effort to see what may of gone so wrong. After we noticed how much bandwidth was being calculated we became very proactive to reduce this number.
While we understand the thumbnail.asp would replace our images being listed one at a time. And we have cache enabled (maybe the server is adding these numbers as bandwidth when called upon even though they are cached on the users computer)
Looking at the stats we only had the chat program on for a few days just before it was shut down without notice. Anyway the chat is a huge bandwidth hog for those looking to reduce bandwidth that would be a great place to start in cutting your bandwidth way down.
On out site we made as many changes as we could think of to make the site less bandwidth this is what we did so far.

• reduced the number of search preview.
• reduced the number of related products from 8 to 4.
• reduced the numbers of products that display in the categories from 48 to 28
• Spent 3 days building an elaborate dropdown menu system that is four categories deep to cut down on our visitors clicking each category level to navigate to the desired pages in the site.

There is nothing more we can do that I can see.
Our images are very optimized at only 4-5kb each.
SO If I missed something please do tell. I can only be hit with fees so much before I scream!
If anyone has a fair answer to help out please do share before I lose my hair.

[rburton34]

I hope this isnt a problem here. On our current cart,. who we are moving from, we have never gone over 20 gb, not even in December, and we signed up for the 15 gb plan here.

Will definitely be keeping my eyes on my BW once I go live.

[brassandsilver]

We have had some trouble with crawlers too, which you just have to watch. Since we switched to 3d, our bandwidth has gone up considerably. In our case, though, we knew this would happen because 3d has so many other features that we did not have before, like the number of photos allowed per product and the zoom features. We are glad to have them, but yes, they do cost more bandwidth. So far we did calculate our needs well enough that we haven't gone over, but it comes close.

For seeing accurate, real time traffic on your site, I can't recommend Woopra enough. It will show you how many visitors are on your site at any given moment, including data on where they are located, and shows you in real time what pages they are viewing using a desktop application. Woopra also has a live chat option that is far more robust than the one included with 3dCart, and after several days of testing the Woopra chat we have decided to switch to that and will be removing the other chat system altogether. We will watch to see how that impacts our bandwidth and let you know.

[Burnspot]

We have had some trouble with crawlers too, which you just have to watch. Since we switched to 3d, our bandwidth has gone up considerably. In our case, though, we knew this would happen because 3d has so many other features that we did not have before, like the number of photos allowed per product and the zoom features. We are glad to have them, but yes, they do cost more bandwidth. So far we did calculate our needs well enough that we haven't gone over, but it comes close.

For seeing accurate, real time traffic on your site, I can't recommend Woopra enough. It will show you how many visitors are on your site at any given moment, including data on where they are located, and shows you in real time what pages they are viewing using a desktop application. Woopra also has a live chat option that is far more robust than the one included with 3dCart, and after several days of testing the Woopra chat we have decided to switch to that and will be removing the other chat system altogether. We will watch to see how that impacts our bandwidth and let you know.

I found a bunch of sites that list "bad bot" rewrites that can be added to the .htaccess file...some were linked from 3D's own support materials. I'd look into that stuff to deny the worst of the bloodsuckers.

I don't use the 3DZoom features on our site mainly because the feature doesn't work in Safari browsers and some Chrome browsers (I've yet to find a 3DZoom-enabled 3DCart site that works properly...including 3D's site), so the side effect is that I'm probably saving a bit of BW there. ;)

I agree, Woopra's turning out to be a very nice addition for a full spread of Analytics/tracking information. I removed the 3D live tracking component, but have left the live chat in place for now as Woopra's chat doesn't appear to work in Safari browsers...at least on the Safari-using systems I tested (I do love Safari, but its a PITA apparently for some features, lol).

[Go Live]

Yes it is expected to receive alot of traffic from the bots for a new or relocated site that is a given.

Since opening day we have used 13gig in spider traffic. Which would leave us with about 15gig in visitor traffic. A new site would probably receive about 98% traffic from the bots for the first month or so. I find it hard to believe we are using about 1/2gig in visitor traffic when more then 90% of visitor traffic leave within 30 seconds. (We use to use Host manager and cpanel to host more then 200 sites and have never seem bandwidth to these extremes. Now I'm not calling anyone a liar and I am sure that support believes these numbers to be accurate and calculated as intended but I do honestly believe that there is a problem that may or may not of began on the 15th of this month when the stats stopped reporting as they should).

So yes high bot traffic for a new site is expected and normal.

So within our first month we're going to need to upgrade for the third time and now incur an additional setup fee of $199.00.
At this point it is only fair to give 3dcart time to find a solution to this problem before we more our other 2 bigger sites at this rate one site would expect to use 700gig and at $500 + a month I think we'll leave it right were it's at for the moment.

[BubbaGump]

We too are also experiencing hi bandwidth usage. The weird thing is we were maxed out before we actually opened the doors to our shopping cart. I looked though the SmarterStats and it show that thumbnail.asp file is responsible for 80% of the usage. I have not idea what this is doing, but it looks like every time a page is called this file is called with it. Maybe this files is duplicating image file data when loading every image or page. Any ideas... I hope in the next revision they will take a look at this.

[brassandsilver]

I found a bunch of sites that list "bad bot" rewrites that can be added to the .htaccess file...some were linked from 3D's own support materials. I'd look into that stuff to deny the worst of the bloodsuckers.

I don't use the 3DZoom features on our site mainly because the feature doesn't work in Safari browsers and some Chrome browsers (I've yet to find a 3DZoom-enabled 3DCart site that works properly...including 3D's site), so the side effect is that I'm probably saving a bit of BW there. ;)

I agree, Woopra's turning out to be a very nice addition for a full spread of Analytics/tracking information. I removed the 3D live tracking component, but have left the live chat in place for now as Woopra's chat doesn't appear to work in Safari browsers...at least on the Safari-using systems I tested (I do love Safari, but its a PITA apparently for some features, lol).

@Burnspot - We don't use 3DZoom either for those same reasons. We just use the zoomify feature. Our old site was so archaic that it didn't even have that.

As for Woopra chat, we tested it in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and it is working fine on all three browsers for us. What problems have you seen with Safari?

[Burnspot]

@Burnspot - We don't use 3DZoom either for those same reasons. We just use the zoomify feature. Our old site was so archaic that it didn't even have that.

As for Woopra chat, we tested it in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and it is working fine on all three browsers for us. What problems have you seen with Safari?

I just couldn't get the little "We're Online" box to appear in Safari. Dumped browser and site cache...all the usual things. I'll have to play with it some more and see if I can sort it out.

Yea, I gave up on the 3DZoom "feature" completely; I haven't seen any further updates from 3D about it in my original thread pointing out the problem. I'd rather not lock out a percentage of potential buyers from actually seeing what they're buying, so it will remain a useless feature for us. It is kind of amusing to have a quasi 3dcart detector built into Safari...any 3dcart site that uses 3DZoom reveals itself when the product images zoom out out of site and disappear. ;)

[kmd316]

I signed up for the forum so I could get some answers about the bandwidth issue. We used to have a Yahoo Store and never had issues with bandwidth. Since switching to 3dcart in November, we've maxed out our bandwidth every month. However, we always see a huge jump in our bandwidth usage right after we notice several huge orders appear in the "not completed" queue. Sometimes they are for as much as $25K. We sell birding supplies, and we'll see hundreds of items added to the cart and then abandoned. It seems like the two are related.

Anyone know what that's all about? I hate to sound so utterly clueless, but we never experienced this before in our 9 years with Yahoo.

[brassandsilver]

I signed up for the forum so I could get some answers about the bandwidth issue. We used to have a Yahoo Store and never had issues with bandwidth. Since switching to 3dcart in November, we've maxed out our bandwidth every month. However, we always see a huge jump in our bandwidth usage right after we notice several huge orders appear in the "not completed" queue. Sometimes they are for as much as $25K. We sell birding supplies, and we'll see hundreds of items added to the cart and then abandoned. It seems like the two are related.

Anyone know what that's all about? I hate to sound so utterly clueless, but we never experienced this before in our 9 years with Yahoo.

Hi kmd316. That activity you see is most likely from some sort of web crawler or bot. It is a common problem. If this is happening a lot, you can block the ip addresses of those through the admin under Settings>General>IP Security. That should help.

[Burnspot]

I signed up for the forum so I could get some answers about the bandwidth issue. We used to have a Yahoo Store and never had issues with bandwidth. Since switching to 3dcart in November, we've maxed out our bandwidth every month. However, we always see a huge jump in our bandwidth usage right after we notice several huge orders appear in the "not completed" queue. Sometimes they are for as much as $25K. We sell birding supplies, and we'll see hundreds of items added to the cart and then abandoned. It seems like the two are related.

Anyone know what that's all about? I hate to sound so utterly clueless, but we never experienced this before in our 9 years with Yahoo.

That sounds like the bot I've seen a couple of times...loads the cart up on successive visits over a few minutes then leaves. I can't remember the name for sure, but I wanna say is was something like "Adaptive Spider...." and it was originating out of Seattle according to the IP address. I'd check the WHOIS of the IP attached to each of those incomplete orders...I remember it being a block of IP's that were being used by the firm operating the bot.