We are wondering what it means when over 40GB was transferred from our site last month (and similar in other months). Does this reflect visits? Or does it mean that people are downloading the whole site (which is a few gigabytes but nothing like 40) for what kinds of reasons, including to work out how to hack it?
We would love to think it reflects visits because registration of these is difficult in these days of adblockers etc. Our site has no ads at all, but it does use cookies to try to count visits.
It means the total sum of all bandwidth last month which was used in delivering assets (images, the text itself, etc) to your visitors.
The web page (html) itself, images, styling/css, all take up bandwidth/data to deliver to visitors so that the website can be shown. Images, Videos, and Downloadable Content (PDFs, etc) being some of the most bandwidth heavy assets usually. Bandwidth used, Data Transfer, are the same thing, if you see the other term mentioned.
It’s correlated with visits in the sense that generally the more visits, the more data your website will transfer.
Consider it like a restaurant serving food to its customers. The food supply used (equivalent to data transferred) is naturally correlated with the number of customers (website visitations). A busy day means using more supplies. However, it doesn’t strictly say what each customer is consuming. Some restaurants serve buffet-style (equivalent to sites rich in content with high-resolution images, videos, etc.), leading to more supply usage even potentially with fewer customers, whereas others might serve smaller portions, using less supplies while serving an equally high number of customers. Similarly, a website visitor downloading a large file once can consume more data than a visitor browsing mostly text pages multiple times.
I can’t think of a better comparison then that at the moment, but the core idea is that it’s simply correlated and a resource that is used in a loading a page, the exact rate of use depends on the site.
There’s tons of information on google as well:
Just keep in mind with Cloudflare, Cloudflare has no limits on bandwidth as long as it’s website related, and not tons of videos/large files through the normal proxy (i.e don’t try to become the next Youtube, Bandwidth does cost money/is limited in the end). Your host behind Cloudflare may have limits, but Cloudflare should be helping anyway with cached items which don’t require your host to serve them (and thus don’t consume bandwidth from your host to deliver).
Downloading all your site’s public assets/resources also wouldn’t help someone hack it.
If you have Cloudflare Pro or higher, you can use Web Traffic Analytics to see which pathes/files are using the most data transfer. 40 GB isn’t too high though.
Thanks a lot for that detailed answer. It helps me to understand. 