Traffic Spike

I try to keep track of traffic on my sites. I regularly check the logs at the end of the month to see what sort of search results there were and if I have abnormal bandwidth hogs. I also look at them at other times if I'm curious, to see how things are going.

Blogs, as anyone should know, are a huge spam draw. Blog comment spam, which I keep a good handle on, and blog trackback and referral spam, which I'm able to keep control of as well, other sites don't fare so well sometimes. I've learned several techniques on the AnacondaSoftware DevBlog for dealing with it on Pivot specifically, and so had certain things in place here to prevent problems from even starting. Nonetheless, there are still some tries. I have tons of traffic and logs from sites trying to spam comments and referrals, but its all kept consistent and always blocked.

Although occasionally something strange happens. In particular, when I logged in to look at them today, I noticed a spike on the 18th. A huge spike. From one IP address, that traces back to Russia, in that one day I had over 2000 hits and page logs, and over 50 MB of bandwidth used. In comparison, I usually have between 2-3 MB of bandwidth used on a day to day basis for this blog. The spam log was relatively bare for that day, and there didn't appear to be any unusual page requests, so I'm not really sure what 50 MB of bandwidth was spent on, but it was done. And that IP hasn't been back since the 18th. I'm going to have to look through the raw logs for the month at this point, then, to see what exactly this machine was up to.