Excessive bandwidth usage on VirtueMart site – 102GB per month

[ThijsE6]

Hi everyone,

I'm running a Joomla website with VirtueMart, and I've noticed an unusually high bandwidth usage — around 102GB per month, which seems excessive considering the number of visitors is relatively low.

I'm trying to identify what's causing this. The site doesn't have large images or videos, and I've already optimized most assets. Still, the traffic seems to consume a lot of data.

Has anyone experienced similar issues with VirtueMart, such as:

High data transfer from product or category pages?

Repeated AJAX or background requests?

Issues with image caching or dynamic image generation?

Any ideas on where to look or how to reduce the bandwidth load would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Thijs

[jflash]

I had a similar problem, but in addition to that, the site was frequently crashing with an Error 500. After examining the logs, I discovered that an aggressive bot was operating on the site, and I had no other choice but to block it in the .htaccess file.

[PRO]

I use akeeba admin tools to create my htaccess file.
They add lots of blocked bots to the list.