Mysterious bandwidth usage

[EJP]

I took down one of my vBulletin forums last winter, and the custom subdomain (forum.powerbasic.com) was pointed at a different company's vBulletin account. I was looking at my account today and noticed that there is a consistent bandwidth usage of right around 600MB per day, which surprised me since nobody but me can access the "old" forum, using the long alphanumeric .vbulletin.net URL. Unless the early hour is messing with my math skills, that comes out to 18GB per month with zero forum traffic, which is a pretty good slice of a 75GB account.

What's that about?

[alfreema]

Do you have a nightly backup process in place?

[Mrs.T]

Do you have a nightly backup process in place?

Cloud backs up every day so that could be it.

[Wayne Luke]

Backups shouldn't be counted as bandwidth. I would suspect that it has been picked up by search engines somehow and they're spidering of the site would account for it. In fact, when I visit your site right now, it shows 12 users online. Well, 11 besides myself. That is 12 guest users using bandwidth. I would bet they are all search engine bots.

[EJP]

Wow, I'm surprised they even found the board at that obscure URL, and that it's 25% of that account's bandwidth! I see only 2 guests right now, and they have been parked on the same two pages for quite a while.

Does vBulletin Cloud offer the equivalent of norobots.txt?

[Wayne Luke]

There is a basic robots.txt but it won't prevent bots from spidering the content. There is no way on cloud to turn off bot spidering at this time on a per-site basis. The main reason for this is because all cloud sites share the exact same set of files.

The only way to deter them is to turn the site off in the AdminCP under Settings -> Options -> Turn your vBulletin On/Off.

[EJP]

Thanks, I don't really care about the inactive forum, I was more concerned with the bandwidth implications for active forums.