Business Casual

A word of caution to anyone who has bandwidth restrictions on their site. Googlebot is a bandwidth eating machine. For October, my site ran about 45 GB of bandwidth. I usually don't pay much attention to my bandwidth these days as most hosting plans you find have either an insane monthly bandwidth limit or no limit at all. But, since this number was a bit higher than I expected, I did a little extra digging and found that the chief consumer of my bandwidth (to the tune of nearly 40 GB) is the Googlebot. I've never really place any restrictions on the Googlebot before because I wanted Google to have as much access to my site as possible to hopefully improve my search results for the Business Casual keyword.

However, this little tidbit of information proved interesting enough that I may want to rethink it a bit. It's possible that this much bandwidth is due to the large amount of forum data that's still hanging around. Anytime I check the forum these days, I see a couple of guests users hanging around. And usually when I check them out, they end up being some sort of search engine spider. Maybe I'll just start restricting the forum a bit. But likely, I'll do nothing. It's not visibly affecting my site in any way, and it's possibly driving a bit of extra traffic to either the forums or the main page. I just thought it was interesting, and I hadn't posted anything in a while.