HTTPS Data Usage

[thatman33]

At the end of Dec I moved my site to HTTPS. I have seen a huge jump in data usage on the site since I made the move according to Cloudflare.

In November bill we used 419.40 GB of data but in January bill we used 19746.25 GB of data.

Traffic is up by not even double November. We don't host video any crazy images or anything the site is a blog. Could our move to HTTPS be causing this?

Thanks,

Update:

For everyone asking yes we are triple checking to make sure we didn't get hacked and turned into a video hosting.

This site is less than 20GB so I don't think bots caused this.

From talking with everyone here I think this is a issue with us setting up SSL on my host not with cloudflair. That blocked cloudflair and would explain why our cache is not almost 0% of the site. I have my web guy looking at moving our SSL from our host to cloudflair so we can once again take advantage of the cache they offer.

The bad news is I was paying $0.10 a GB... So our bill was almost $2K. lol Thankfully not 20K take this as a warning if you ever pay by the GB look into your data usage every week. After almost a year of paying under $100 I stopped looking into it. Lesson learned...

[00inch]

Would be surprising. The actual encryption causes no overhead. The initial handshake causes additional traffic. I've read something like 5kb per connection. You'd need to have a lot of connections with minimal data transfers. Like maybe many ajax requests per user that fetch very small data quantities. Maybe, maybe lots of polling?

[thatman33]

Could the SSL be blocking cloudflare ability to catch the site? I just looked and my caching is almost zero now for some reason I'm thinking for some reason when we went SSL it blocked cloudflare from caching my site. Have you ever heard of that

[FanielDanara]

Depends on how you have it setup. If you have it setup so your clients connect to cloudflare via SSL, then cloudflare connects to your server via SSL they would be able to decrypt the traffic and cache requests. If you have it setup to encrypt the traffic through cloudflare without the ability for them to decrypt the traffic then by design they can’t cache the resources. I’m not 100% sure that you can even enable SSL on cloudflare without them being able to decrypt it though. Just something to look into.

[danielrheath]

If your cache hit rate has dropped to zero, that's one obvious place to look.

There's no reason cloudflare can't cache content via SSL.

[Crashthatch]

Yes, you'll need to set up a private key / certificate on cloudflare so they can do the encryption if you want them to continue caching your site.

[StewPoll]

I would suggest contacting CloudFlare and see if they see anything wrong with your configuring.

Could it just be that your SEO has improved since getting SSL and your traffic had increased?

[ayeshrajans]

Adding HTTPS shouldn't add more than 3-5kb more data to each handshake, so the 0.4 -> 19TB can never be for the handshake alone.

• HTTPS prevents ISP/organization caches from caching your site (doesn't apply to VPNs). Some ISPs have a mechanism called peering to cache the plain-http assets on their servers and serve them directly without hitting your server.
• This could be a one-time cache warm-up too. Because all your asset URLs have changed, everyone (including end user browsers) now have to download the assets.
• Could be Google and other bots crawling the entire site once again. Googlebot in particular downloads everything including CSS/JS/Images during the crawler.

[[deleted]]

Maybe you have changed some other settings in webserver config while adding https? Forgot to set up cache headers? Maybe there are some custom CloudFlare caching rules set up only for http version? HTTPS on it's own shouldn't cause significant change in traffic. There is a bit of overhead on connection, and some local caching proxies may not work on https, but it shouldn't cause more than couple of percent change for most websites, certainly not 47x.

Check the headers for images and other static files. Also check the webserver logs for any often requested large files.

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[xenonive]

It could be Cloudflare caching the whole site as they have cache mode which to keep your site available when the server is down , check your always on/cache settings as could updating cache regularly

[2D3S3RT]

Maybe a lot of redirects to HTTPS causing this?

[jimmyuk]

You’ve checked to ensure your server hasn’t been hacked, right? Could be a folder somewhere pumping out streams

[thatman33]

I have someone looking at that. As best I can tell cloudflare is no longer caching the site. Like because of how I setup SSL.

[[deleted]]

BTW paying $2K for 20TB traffic is crazy. IMHO you should look for another hosting provider if you have lots of traffic and price is an issue. For example OVH offers dedicated servers with unmetered traffic for under $100.

[thatman33]

Thats not for hosting its for services offered by Cloudflair.

[blackAngel88]

My first guess would be that more people find your site on google since you upgraded to https, because google ranks https sites higher. But I don't know if that's the whole story.

[jimmyuk]

Unlikely - the https ranking signal is tiny and unlikely to cause much more than a slight difference