progressive house podcasts :: adamcoates.com

I recently was mildly concerned to find that in one month I’ve served in the region of 50GB of traffic from this site….. Now I host my own podcasts so thats obviously going to account for a lot of traffic (I’m looking at moving the podcasts off to a free hosting solution). But more worrying was that a single IP address seems to have been responsible for downloading 6GB for the month of March (202.108.43.220). A whois lookup reveals that this IP address orginates in China. A grep of my access logs shows that they kept downloading the same mp3 from the site which accounts for the traffic. My question is this… Is this a DoS attempt or is this some sort of traffic aggregator/proxy that all chinese traffic is routed through? I’m not sure if I should be blocking this with iptables or whether that would actually be detrimental to chinese users (who apparently are big fans of the trance mix I did a while ago?!)

Anyway – perhaps I’ll just shift the enclosures over to a free hosting supplier and let them worry about it. I need the bandwidth back and having looked into the cost of renting some webspace rather than using my home broadband connection I’ve decided its too expensive.

I’ve also introduced robots.txt after discovering that for the month of march Google, Yahoo & MSN are responsible for nearly 7GB of upload bandwidth… 7GB!!! – a quick search through the logs indicates that they are not pulling mp3s down but they do seem to have an appetite for the m4as (enhanced podcasts)….

Conclusion: Move the enclosures to seperate hosting, update robots.txt, possibly update iptables to band china(?) and I should hopefully get back a lot of lost bandwidth without having to incur the cost of dedicated hosting.