Frink The problem is that I cannot baby sit site owners. The free offering of 5GB was far more than enough to support thousands (1000's) of forum posts per week. Sorry about the late response, between travel and work I just didn't have the time to check into the free server offering.
Pollux Cloudflare would have done you well. You didn't exceed bandwidth because of valid traffic, but rather because file(s) in your /api/users/ folder were being abused.
All previous months you far less than 1GB of traffic. In fact just the previous month before the "exceeding" bandwidth you had used only 300MB of traffic. I cannot provide WAF or other monitoring of forums requests. Thus the suggestion to use services such as Cloudflare (free), Sucuri, etc.
The API folder was accessed during that month some 170,541 times, at over 70% of all requests and about 70% of total bandwidth for said month. In AWstats the filetype listed as "unknown". Cloudflare when setup correctly would have help guard your bandwidth from abuse or even bogus traffic.
You could have used the free cPanel account to download raw access log to see this on your own. I cannot offer that level of support free, for issues so basic/simple or it will consume too much time.
Thanks for giving this free offer a try! I hoped I could provide purely a hardware and network offering where I wouldn't have to constantly guide or support as there are already Flarum support forums and other self help options so that one could find the cause and solve a 15x to 20x bandwidth increase symptom.
See attached, without any identifiable information:
...That # of accesses to /api/users/ would be a red flag for me considering you mentioned: "At this time I had about 500-600 posts per week written by about 10-20 active users and probably some interest from further onlookers who didn't register"
Sorry I could not log into your account for you at the time. I just had zero availability. If I have the time I don't mind helping but I just don't have the time to support free accounts.
