My wife and I were reviewing the stats in cPanel from our web host (I think they use awstats) and we noticed that with only 6 days completed we have almost maxed our 2Gb bandwidth usage for February.

The site being hosted holds a simple Wordpress blog site. We don’t even upload our pictures there. Images are uploaded to Flickr and linked from the blog. There is email usage, but not nearly to the volumes we are seeing in the stats.

It seems that each night between midnight and 4am – while we’re sleeping – a massive amount of POP3 traffic is being associated with our domain / web hosting account. Any ideas for how I can investigate this from my end or what I should tell the techs at the web host to look for? It seems to me that their server is being used as a spam distribution or relay point and that they need to go lock some stuff down, but I am not sure how to explain it to them.

Thus far, their troubleshooting has amounted to “wow! I guess you get a lot of email after midnight!”. We explained that our computers are on 24/7 and the email client is set to download every 1 minute- so it is virtually impossible for us to have any such spike in traffic.

Any clues?