Big bandwidth increase
 

Ok, so recently we changed to vBulletin 3.8 from a very old heavily customized version of phpBB2.

Since then, we have had a MASSIVE increase in bandwidth. Our forum is pretty tiny (fairly specialist topic) with 155 active users and about 460 total users. I've had to upgrade our hosting plan twice in 2 months because we keep breaking through the bandwidth limit.

My honest opinion and the only one that I can see from the logs is that vbulletin sites get attacked by spambots WAY WAY WAY more than other boards. While they generally fail (our anti-spam post setup seems to keep them out) they chew up a lot of bandwidth over time.

Below is a stat image of our bandwidth. It's not hard to see that we changed to vbulletin in mid-December. As you can see, before we switched our data transfer was barely evening registering at all in most months.

Anyone got any advice on what I can do to minimize this traffic?

http://hopkins.jp/images/bandwidth.png