Hi factualpear,
Good question... We encountered another website from Asian origin, deep-linking into our game files. What this means is that they were stealing our bandwidth at a very high rate per day. Bandwidth is measured by how much data is downloaded from a website, per day. So, everytime you view a webpage, play a game, etc online you use bandwidth from a website. The owner of a website actually pays for the amount of bandwidth used per month. So when another website deep-links into another sites files they are effectively 'stealing' bandwidth.
On Wednesday we received nearly 8,000 hits just on one game, which clocked up 3.5Gb during one day! For us to continually run at those figures we would need to pay around £60.00 a month to stay online.
The main problem we had was that the website in question were 'masking' their IP address, so we could not therefore block the website/s. What I have done is placed redirects on the games they were using, so of instead of a game, they end up on our frontpage. Now I have closed it down to members only, and turned up security even further - I'm hoping the website will eventually remove the direct game links to here. Another feature we have enabled is denying access from certain IP addresses, but we have to be careful, because I did block Australia by mistake.
ops:
Our amount of visitors is gradually returning to normal, but we are still receiving many hits from Japan and Korea.
Once we get down to an acceptable level then I'll re-open the site fully to guests.
Great ain't it, running a website? :?
We'll actually I run 8 websites!
Anyway, laters...
Linear Mode
