Direct/Redirect - Web Traffic Problem

lawrencesk

I would like to know how to solve a web traffic problem using php.

Problem:
I am having a tremendous amount of traffic coming to our site. The trouble is they are not legitimate visitors. Our sever log shows that over 60% of our traffic is coming from browsers without a referer or they are anonymous. 90% visit for less than 10 seconds which of course still drives our bandwidth nuts. The only solution our server host personnel could come up with is for us to change our domain name. "Dah". It could be my host server trying to scam me by giving me bogus stats. I am truly at a loss as to solving this problem and would appreciate ways to either creatively solve this issue or get evidence that I could bring to the police.

Thanks for your anticipated help on this problem.

brandonschnell

depends on if your cohosting or virtual hosting.

for example if you're cohosting i'd change the ip address of the web server and the domain to match. that way if the visitors are bringing up your site by ip or out of date dns entry they won't follow to the new ip. ISPs reuse ip addresses. if your web server is on an ip that was used previously by a popular site then that can drive up your traffic.

if the traffic follows to the new dns then someone is intentionally sending users to your site. does your site have content that users are look to leech from?

start looking for patterns in the source ip & http request headers to see if its a denial of service attack. this is the only case where the police might be used. if users are accidently typing in the url/ip or if someone is sending users to your site you have few legal options.

Anon

Thanks for your suggestions. I pay a host server to have us on the web. They have a stats pages for my site but these pages do not the ip addresses for the visitors. Since I posted this message, I asked my server host for my access logs for the past 3 months and was told that these records where removed. I asked why they were removed and was told these are large files and take up hard drive space. Isn't that akin to a store burning it's records for income?

Theyuse a program called Urchin 3.3 and so I would not be able to read the logs unless I had Urchin.

Thanks for your suggestion by tracking the ip and http. It is nice to get another persons perspective. Any further ideas would be appreciated.

Anon

If your host refuses access to raw stats then it's time for a new host IMHO.