How can I tell what's eating up my bandwidth?

[JR123]

Hi all,

We've had a cart for years now, and bandwidth was never an issue until recently. Only 2 things have changed:

1) We were hosting some pictures for Amazon products on our cart. When the bandwidth started going way up, we moved them off to Amazon's internal photo hosting.

2) We got Pingdom. Still using it.

My only logical conclusion is that Pingdom is the culprit, but is there a way for me to tell for sure?

Thanks in advance!
-James

[thecartdesigner]

My guess would be pingdom. I am sure you could contact 3dcart and they should be able to tell you exactly whats eating your bandwidth. Or just ditch Pingdom for a bit and see if it changes for the better.

Do you have 3dcart Stats? That should tell you also if you do.

[onering]

I had the same problem and contacted support. They used Smarterstats to chart bandwidth by IP address. It turns out that our account already had Smarterstats set up, but I didn't realize it until they told me.

[JR123]

Thank you both. I'm going to try 3DCartDesign's suggestion of contacting support to see if they can delve deeper.

When I view the Reports in our admin dashboard (and pull the report for Bandwidth Usage), I can only find where it gives you the bandwidth used based on a date range -- Today, Yesterday, Last 15 Days, Last 30 Days, etc. (but goes no further into what source(s) are pulling the bandwidth).

Thanks again for your help! I'm pretty sure it has to be Pingdom, we have them "pinging" our website every 1 minute. Perhaps increasing the interval would help (maybe every 3 minutes or so). I'll try that.

Also, I saw on another recent forum post (in a different category) that someone had suggested creating an ultra-light page that Pingdom "pings"...right now I think it pings our home page, which has the slider, pictures, and is probably fairly heavy.

Thanks again!
James

[cbsteven]

If you have the Professional Plan ($99) or higher, you have access to the SmarterStats package that lets you dig into traffic by IP address or by crawler type. You may have to email support for your password.

[JR123]

Thanks cbsteven. We have several carts, but this one in particular is on the super-simple Starter plan since it has WAY fewer products than our other 3D Carts...though I wish any plan came with those SmarterStats, sounds useful!

I appreciate the advice!
-James