Exceeding Bandwidth

Guest

I note from other posts that you operate a policy of account suspension when the monthly bandwidth allowance is reached and purchasing extra bandwidth is relatively expensive (£2/1G/month). Although I would not normally expect my site to get anywhere near the bandwidth allowance, one does hear horror stories of sites experiencing massive surges in bandwidth due to denial of service attacks. Do you have any mechanisms in place to prevent this?

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in NetHosted. Please bear in mind that any suspensions certainly should not come as a surprise, you get warning emails starting from 80% usage upwards (at 95% they become very frequent). This gives ample time for you to get into contact if you feel the bandwidth usage is out of sorts so that we can investigate this matter. The chances are if your site was experiencing a DDoS attack of some variety we'd certainly have noticed pretty quickly and would have let you know what measures we had put in place to stop/ease the attack! It's therefore unlikely that such an attack would be so sustained that your monthly bandwidth was sucked up in a short amount of time.

On a related note, we also offer full hotlinking protection so if you feel one file/image is causing a lot of bandwidth usage you can stop people from accessing it directly, only from via your website.

Hope that helps,

Andrew

Posted: Wed Oct 11, 2006 1:51 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your reply. It is reassuring to hear that you monitor these things. I am not an expert in these matters, but given that 8Mbit/Sec connection speeds are available to home users these days, I reckon that 5GBytes could be consumed by a vindictive user in little over an hour. Are you confident that you could respond in this time, and if you didn't, would you consider resetting the bandwidth allowance for free? By the way, I'm not expecting anyone to do this to my site, just exploring the possibilities in the unlikely event that it did happen!

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5684

I think each individual case would be assessed on its merits so I couldn't really comment at this point. If a user is just continually downloading a large file to try and use up your bandwidth this is something we wouldn't action against without you requesting us to do so - it's not really our perogative to decide what is legitimate or not in these sort of situations. Clearly we step in if the user is performing something like a DoS attack as this will affect the performance of the server as a whole and therefore will be detected and dealt with if possible.

Andrew

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