I did a bit more probing of my webstats [1] and located when my bandwidth shot up—February 22^nd 2006 [2]:
Table: Bandwidth increase Date Bytes Hits Status Okay (200) Redirects (300) Client errors (400) Server errors (500) ------------------------------ 02-19-06 12,167,334 2,240 2,075 163 2 0 02-20-06 11,955,375 2,017 1,863 151 3 0 02-21-06 12,511,210 2,372 2,197 173 2 0 02-22-06 56,693,839 2,145 1,792 137 13 203 02-23-06 45,939,357 1,737 1,563 152 5 17
I checked the logs on the on the 21^st and 22^nd, and for some odd reason, Apache didn't bother logging the bytes transferred on the 21^st (and prior) but did starting on the 22^nd (and afterwards). I switched servers in February of this year [3] so that's not the explanation—perhaps I upgraded Apache [4] that month or something (since most of the pages served up on this domain are done via a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) script, it looked like Apache didn't bother to track the amount of data served in that case, and later versions do).
That might also explain the drop in bandwidth around July/August of 2002—I might have upgraded Apache then and that particular version didn't record the bytes sent via a script properly. So basically, the bandwidth metric is useless between July 2002 and February 2006.
Not that I'm overly concerned about it—it was more curiosity than anything else (and if need be, I could reconstruct the data since I have versions of previous templates used, but there's no need).
Also contributing to the spike in early 2006 are actual traffic spikes that happened in April of 2007, like here:
Table: Bandwith Spike Date Bytes Hits Status Okay (200) Redirects (300) Client errors (400) Server errors (500) ------------------------------ 03-31-06 49,231,768 1,977 1,771 196 8 2 04-01-06 148,802,602 5,442 5,233 171 38 0 04-02-06 59,528,160 2,197 2,030 164 2 1
But those are more easily explained as simply more hits.