Help! 133% bandwidth used by thief!!

[John84]

I have always gone far below my monthly bandwidth limit (2500 Gigs) with my host (1and1). All of a sudden, I reached my limit half way through October and has gone over by almost 1000 gigs. This is costing me .50 per gig!! I didn't realize it until it was too late and now I will be billed almost, if not over, $400 for this. I think, more than likely, someone used my image hosting site to steal all this bandwidth. Am i screwed or do you think 1and1 would hear my pleas?!?!

 

[exponent]

You're probably going to have to pay the bill, but it wouldn't hurt you to try. I would suggest preventing bandwidth-jacking by preventing remote linking via your HTACCESS file.

 

[champ_rock]

i thnk u have no option but to pay the bill . they will simply say that it is not their responsibility to prevent hotlinking but yours

 

[shockie]

if you're offering free image hosting then they aren't really stealing bandwidth. i just clicked on "images host" in your sig (assuming that's your site), and it seems like you've disabled the entire site. maybe you can start working on a way to limit its usage based on accounts or something like that.

you should also look into limiting how much bandwidth each of your sites are allowed to use on your hosting account, although i'm unsure whether 1and1 has this feature.

 

[Joe]

Something you should ALWAYS look at the price of overcharging.

For instance, I charge $0.15 per GB, some other hosts $0.20... $0.50 is REALLY bad. Then again you wont get 2.5tb bandwidth for less than $150-$200 from the understanding hosts.

Theres not much you can do but pay the bill and contact their support to prevent this from happening again. If they refuse to help.. MOVE!.

cPanel does have a function to prevent image hotlinking... But 1&1 doesn't use cPanel.

 

[Hycari]

Yeah, 1and1 uses their own control panel, and I personally don't like it. It also doesn't make it as easy to migrate accounts, but then again anytime you go across control panels is always a little harder.

 

[CrazyTech]

A large company is generally not going to be very forgiving. I would appeal with them to perhaps save some money, but it's your website that was using the bandwidth so in the end you're going to have to pay for it. Bandwidth is not something that is negotiable, generally.

I think this is an example of being just another number. Although ultimately your fault, a smaller firm may be more apt to contact you in advance when something like this is going to happen. Now I don't mean they'll know it before it occurs, but you're not going to get to the range of a $400 overage charge without notification.

 

[Camron]

CrazyTech is right, these large businesses don't care if you leave, they just want your money.

It's not necessarily someone stealing your bandwidth, but more likely that someone is using your image host to direct link images from their site. If you allow it, people will take it. Free services are always like this.

If I were you, contact 1and1 and it is very unlikely but possible that there was a hiccup in the system and the bandwidth reading is wrong - 2000GB sure is a lot for an image host.

- Camron

 

[John84]

I have sent a couple emails with my pleas and, as most of you have predicted, those pleas were not heard and I must front the bill. I don't really blame 1and1. I suppose I must simply accept it as a big mistake on my part and move on. Thanks for the replies.

 

[hostparlor]

I suggest you turn on hot link protection in your cpanel if you have cpanel.

 

[John84]

no cpanel

 

[iHubNet-Matt]

You can add hotlink protection rules in the .htaccess file for the domains.