web hosting bandwidth

qob

Ok I think my sites been sabotaged :S my hosting allows 7gig a month bandwidth, they say thats sufficient for 50 sites, I have 3, 2 flash sites and last night i uploaded a simple html one with 6 pictures on it, today i recieve a call from the guardian newspaper asking me to remove those 6 pictures, something to do with contractual agreements and health n safety at glastonbury, along those lying lines anyway, so i said i would. when i log on to my pc to go to the cpanel to do this, it says I cant because my bandwidth has been taken to the limit, my 1st thought was the guardian had done something, but i contacted my host anyway and they were shocked that 7gig was used up in 4 hours and this cant be dont uploading 6 small photos, so im back to my first theory of the guardian sending loads of traffic or something to my site which made it reach its limit. surely this is illegal?

faevilangel

qob wrote: »

Ok I think my sites been sabotaged :S my hosting allows 7gig a month bandwidth, they say thats sufficient for 50 sites, I have 3, 2 flash sites and last night i uploaded a simple html one with 6 pictures on it, today i recieve a call from the guardian newspaper asking me to remove those 6 pictures, something to do with contractual agreements and health n safety at glastonbury, along those lying lines anyway, so i said i would. when i log on to my pc to go to the cpanel to do this, it says I cant because my bandwidth has been taken to the limit, my 1st thought was the guardian had done something, but i contacted my host anyway and they were shocked that 7gig was used up in 4 hours and this cant be dont uploading 6 small photos, so im back to my first theory of the guardian sending loads of traffic or something to my site which made it reach its limit. surely this is illegal?

unless you can prove it was them, you can't say nothing, its not illegal to send traffic to a webpage either,,, i would ask your host if they have a copy of the ip addresses that visited ? most accounts have a stat viewer! if yours doesn't then get one such as statcounter.com and monitor it? were the images hot property of illegal stuff ? how big were the images ? maybe it was just normal traffic and cos they are "big" images then it used your bw?

qob

i'll wait and see when my cpanels back up what the ip was, they are increasing my bandwidth so hopefull it'l be sorted, the pictures were scans of the line up and times for glastonburyso they would of classed them hot propety i assume (even though we will all be given one in a weeks time!), the pictures certainly werent big, 7x5 on screen dpi of 72 so it blatantly wasnt that. i'll get the ip and plan how i will get my own back

chunter

I'd be shocked if 7 gbyte was used up in 4 hours.
It can't be done by a single computer.
And I doubt if the Guardian organised an attack on your websites.
Something just doesn't fit here, IMO.

Even if a flash page was a ridiculous 10mb
100 pages = 1 gigabyte
700 pages = 7 gigabyte

RobTang

It would only take 2 hours to download 7gig on a 10mbit connection.

assuming the webserver can handle it and most companies have really good internet connections.

mattwallisuk

Check if any of your images are being "hotlinked" by other websites, this can cause very quick usage.

7GB is not a huge amount of bandwidth and these days with higher quality images and media content it can quickly be burnt if something is popular or linked to from other sites.

Jaffa.

At a guess the guardian has hot linked to your site (seeing your hosting their images therefore they've made use of this 'free' bandwidth.) A lot of people would access the guardian so it would make sense that 7GB was taken by their visitors. Use this to see if your images are being hot linked

qob

thanks guys, ive calmed down now my sites are working so im not bothered anymore. how can i stop pictures from being hotlinked? do i just have to disable the right click option? i will look into this, thankyous! ! ! !

mattwallisuk

You need some code in an .htaccess file, which will stop other sites from using the image, and only allow your local site access to the image.

Google for hotlink protection and you should find the code you need.

Disabling right click is not hotlink protection.

We've seen clients burn 100GB+ in 1 day from popular images being hotlinked, so don't feel bad for your 7GB

System

As you have cpanel for your hosting, there is a facility in there to deal with hot linking.

Martin81162

Have you checked your logs to see who the culprit was?