Excessive Bandwidth Use

[favdes]

Good morning everyone,

I was wondering if someone might be able to help me with this.

We have three sites running that are using an excessive amount of bandwidth. I have run some security checks on one of the sites but haven't found any issues. The problem is that we have a bandwidth limit on our hosting and each site exceeds that limit each month.

I have trawled through the server logs and blocked IP addresses that appear to be the heaviest users but the problem continues. Is there a Joomla component that we can install, or some other automatic method, to block malicious users to the site?

Kind regards


James

[itoctopus]

Try AdminTools or RS Firewall. If you have no problem paying for the extension then the latter would probably be a better option (that is just a personal opinion). I find that AdminTools can sometimes cause issues on the website.

[favdes]

Hi itoctopus,

Thanks for getting back to me. Do you mean Akeeba AdminTools?

I've installed that but can't see anywhere to configure bandwidth limitations / spam protection. Is it automatically enabled?

Sorry, having a thick morning!

Kind regards


James

[Bernard T]

@favdes: The first ones that should help you with that subject are hosting provider stuff. They could give you much better insight what is the main traffic destination.

AdminTools or RS Firewall are not meant to be used for traffic shaping. That should be done on the lower level.

[favdes]

Hi Bernard,

Thank you. I've been going through cPanel and blocking IP addresses but I'm looking for something automatic.

Kind regards


James

[Bernard T]

Hi James,

take into account that most users have dynamic IP's, so only blocking by IP could prove rather useless. And especially malicious ones take special care to use botnets to rotate IP's.

My educated advice from daily experience:

• find out if those suspect users are really malicious, or just regular traffic
• find out what they target
• check their IP's against some blacklists like Project Honeypot - if those are listed, then you could use this blacklist to automatically reject them the access
• try CloudFlare free edition, it could offload your bandwidth, especially if it's mostly static contents, also it protects you from most generic bad users and bots, firewalls you a bit and as a bonus - boost your website speed and accessibility around the globe being CDN for static stuff

Hope that generic advices help. Your hosting provider should help you more.

[joo_newbie]

Hello favdes.
How did you fix your issue? I am having the exact same problem.
Thank you.

[favdes]

Hi joo,

Sort of. I've just been keeping our sites up to date by updating Joomla and updating the various components and modules.

Give this a go and hopefully it will work for you too.

[joo_newbie]

Thank you. Everything is up-to-date in my website, yet I'm still struggling with this issue.