Excessive Usage

Home | Helpdesk | Product Help | Homepages | Excessive Usage

Introduction
Levels of usage
The 'Quota Usage' control panel
Bandwidth questions
Suspended sites
Accessing a suspended site
What to do if your site has been suspended

Introduction

The Demon Internet Homepages Acceptable Use Policy requires either that Homepages sites exceeding a defined level of usage must be modified by the customer, to reduce their usage, or that the customer must upgrade their site to an alternative service.

Levels of Usage

Your Homepages site will have a 'soft quota' limit of 2.5GB of data transfer per month.

If you exceed this limit you will be sent a warning email to webmaster@hostname.demon.co.uk to inform you that you need to either reduce your bandwidth usage or upgrade your account. If your site exceeds the soft quota limit for too long then your site will be suspended. The warning email will tell you how long you have left before your site is suspended.

Your site also has a 'hard quota' limit of 4GB per month. If you reach the hard quota limit you will also be sent a warning email to webmaster@hostname.demon.co.uk , however, your site will be suspended straight away. This is to protect our server against abuse.

If your site has been suspended because it is over quota then please either reduce your bandwidth usage or upgrade to one of our commercial web hosting offerings via your control panel .

If you have reduced your bandwidth usage but your site is not reinstated automatically, then please contact the helpdesk at helpdesk@demon.net . If you have upgraded your account to one of our commercial web hosting offerings but it is still suspended then please contact our commercial web support team at websupport@demon.net . Please include the username for your website in the email,

Please also see our Troubleshooting Guide for more information on disk space quotas.

The 'Quota Usage' control panel

Your control panel has a section labelled 'Quota Usage' which will show you how much bandwidth and disk space you are using on your site. This will also confirm if you are exceeding any of your quota limits.

Homepages comes with 20MB web space, but in the "Quota Usage" you will see you have 22MB. This is because there is nearly 2MB of system files, leaving 20MB useable space for your web site.

Bandwidth Questions

What is included in the bandwidth calculations?

All HTTP access to your Homepages site is included in the bandwidth calculations. Your own FTP access, for uploading files or downloading logs, is excluded.

What about Web robots?

Web robots are programmes that automatically index web pages, for example by search engines. Requests to your site from these robots will be included in the bandwidth calculations. Please note that the majority of robots only index the text parts of your pages and that well-written robots generally follow the ‘Robots exclusion standard' which is detailed at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html .

Why doesn't the counter tally with the requests in the 'Statistics' and 'Log analysis'?

The number of requests reported within the 'Statistics' and 'Log analysis' sections of your control panel will always be higher than those reported by counters owing to a number of factors such as:

- The number of hits is incremented for each requested item located within the page. In other words, if you have ten images within the page, the number of hits will be incremented by 11 (the html file counts as one) each time the page is accessed. (Graphical counters are also included in the request count.)

- The 'Statistics' and 'Log analysis' counts the total requests for your site, whereas a counter tallies the number of times it has been run.

- Web clients often avoid executing the counter CGI -bin if they already have a locally cached copy.

- Incomplete transactions or aborted transfers are counted as hits even if the request is cancelled in mid-transfer.

- Text only browsers usually do not execute graphical counters.

Can I delete the bwusage.txt (or banduse.txt) file?

Bandwidth use was previously logged in a file called bwusage.txt, or the even older banduse.txt. These can be safely deleted as they have been replaced by the 'Quota Usage', 'Statistics' and 'Log analysis' sections of your control panel . These include additional information such as the top ten bandwidth usage per file, to aid with the administration of the site.

Why didn't I get any email notification about my bandwidth usage?

There are a few reasons why you might not have seen details of your bandwidth usage:

You have not exceeded your quota usage or not exceeded it for long enough.
Your email software is not accepting mail for webmaster@hostname.demon.co.uk
You have not read your email addressed to webmaster@hostname.demon.co.uk

How can I reduce my bandwidth usage?

If you do not want to upgrade your webspace, s uggestions for reducing the bandwidth usage of your site can be viewed in the FAQ and graphics tutorials .

The Webalizer statistics linked from the 'Log Analysis' section of your control panel will list the top ten items on your site that use the most bandwidth. Click on each month and look at the section for 'Top 10 of X Total URLs By KBytes'. Reducing the size of those items may help lower your bandwidth usage.

Check to see whether your bandwidth is being used up by high volumes of visitors. If you are getting a lot of traffic to your site, consider advertising or sponsorship to fund an upgrade to your Demon hosting package and bandwidth so you can grow your website.

Suspended sites

A Homepages site may be suspended or withdrawn for a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy or exceeding your Quota limits.

Accessing a suspended site

Internet users who access your pages when they are suspended, will receive the message ‘Error 400 - Bad Request'. The owner of the suspended site will still have access to the site via FTP and to their control panel.

What to do if your site has been suspended

If your site has been suspended for exceeding quota limits, an automated email will be sent to webmaster@hostname.demon.co.uk . You will need to follow the instructions mentioned previously.