Weird problem with bandwidth

[WayneO]

I use smf for www.hfx4sale.com.  It is saying i use over 40gb of bandwidth a month.  I only have 3000 members anyone know why this is ? 

[Aaron]

I think you should contact your host about that. 3000 members in combination with 40 GB bandwidth sounds reliable to me though.

[motumbo]

That's a lot of bandwidth!

Are search engines spidering you often and deeply?  If so, that can suck up a lot of bandwidth.  I recently read about how Google spiders more popular websites and forums sometimes daily.  Some webmasters aren't happy with the bandwidth consumed. 

There is a way to instruct the search engines to spider your site less often.  If that is the problem you are having, you may want to check into it.  I just checked your pagerank (3) and the number of pages in Google.  It's not that high (400+), but you are getting spidered beyond your index page.

[redone]

You could always use robots.txt and ban Google bot or restrict where the bot will go. I would also ask for proof from your host that you are actually using that much bandwidth.

[H]

DO NOT ban Google if you want new members coming to your site.

Try using the crawler delay:

In robots.txt:

User-Agent: *
Crawl-Delay: 20

[Harro]

Take a look at your stats.
If you have e.g. AWstats, you can see the most frequently visited pages,...
Also, do you have stuff like an arcade on your forum?

[jordanpardy2863]

That's not all that much bandwidth..most hosts allow way more than that anyway. I run on a very cheap host and I have 250 GB of alloted bandwidth, so its nothing to worry about yet.