forums/bandwidth

Since adding a forum to my site my bandwidth has gone downhill.
What sucks it down? I made a couple of tutorials with pics and figured that was it so I changed em to links. Didn't help. I'm brand new to this part of the world. Any advice on how to save as much as possible is appriciated.

I suggest you look at your web logs if you have them to determine first off exactly where your bandwidth is going. If you have raw access logs you might use some program like webalizer or the countless others to take the logs and compile them into a report for which you can determine exactly what is eating up your bandwidth. If you get many visitors and load some large images, or large html files, then that could definetely eat up the bandwidth. Also if you give away really large files like movie files, or programs where numerous people can download, that has potential as well to consume large amounts. How much bandwidth are you using?

down?!?! wierd. gotta be somethign wrong, and as bigwb
said, the logs would show it.

thats another drag... the logs are compressed in a way I can't unzip em with winzip.

What is the extension that might give you a hint on how they are compressed? .gz? .tar.gz ? something else?

it's .gz

Do you have telnet access? or ssh access?

All you gotta do is type

gunzip thefile.gz

and that will extract everything out of the file and get rid of the .gz file. Usually files will be something like somefile.tar.gz which means after you type

gunzip thefile.tar.gz

what will be remaining is thefile.tar

You could then type

tar -xvf thefile.tar to extract all the files/data out of the tar file.