bandwidth problem

OK.. here's newbie again with another newbie question.

I have my forum hosted here with WebWiz.. and I have 500mb bandwidth per month.  Problem is.. I have already used 515mb in just the first 10 days!

Why is that?  is it because of traffic to the site?  We only have 37 members and they don't even post all that often!

Could someone be sabotaging the site?  like just lurking to use up the bandwidth? 

I checked around here, and found the only resolve is to make the forums show up with around 10 threads.. and that is already set that way.  What else can I do?  someone said to host the images on another server.  I have a personal website someplace else.. but don't know if that is worth the hastle, or if I should just upgrade my plan here to the "business plan" which gives me 8000mb.  But if someone is just abusing my site.. then that won't solve any problems either.

What have you guys experienced?  how many mb of bandwidth do your forums use? 

oh.. then today, we are all having a hard time navigating on the forum.  keep getting a "server busy" error message. 

I hope someone can help.. I just am so new at this .. I don't know what to do/try.

thanks much you guys.

THANKS for your reply.

OK... these mb kb and gb all just get me screwed up.  I just looked at the size of my logo, and it's "15432 bytes"  so is that mb, kb or gb or WHAT???

Now.. that must be a pretty large file, so it seems like it would be best to host them elsewhere, BUT.. then I may have the same problem there too! 

I have cut down on the images in the logo, I think I only have the one now.   and it's a .gif.. isn't that the smallest file?

I am sorry for the silly questions.. just trying to figure all this out.. there is so much to learn.

I suppose if I upgrade to the business plan, 8000mb should hold me a month eh?

In my opinion, the problem does not come from the images.

When a client ask for a web page, the first time images are downloaded, they are saved in the hard disk (temporally files). So when you acces again to a webpage, the image is loaded locally so there is no bandwithd consum. So the images should not generate such a huge traffic.

Maybe I am in a wrong, but I think that it works in such a kind of way!

Byes.

PD: Excuse my bad english.

This is maybe why your bandwidth has exceeded 500Mb as you have had over 5000 hits to your site, your site stats for your site are:-

Monthly Statistics for May 2003

Total Hits	42580
Total Files	12073
Total Pages	5422
Total Visits	343
Total KBytes	133537
Total Unique Sites	107
Total Unique URLs	358
Total Unique Referrers	78
Total Unique User Agents	22

This is quite good for a new site to have this much traffic in your first month.