Hit limit abuse?

[gimf]

My package is relatively new and I've done hardly any promotion for the two websites that I have hosted. Today I joined an online forum and placed one of my domain names in my signature. Only half an hour later my site has already peaked out due to "hit limit abuse". I think it is unacceptable that I can't promote my site without fear of it getting deactivated every day and pissing off potentially interested people who wish to see the content. I can hardly believe that this limit can be reached so quickly. I do not have and do not intend to have a traffic intensive site - the ratio between bandwidth and hit limit doesn't quite seem to correspond.

What solutions can anyone offer to this problem?
Does anyone know what PowWeb's official position is regarding increasing/removing hit limits?

[RTH10260]

My package is relatively new and I've done hardly any promotion for the two websites that I have hosted. Today I joined an online forum and placed one of my domain names in my signature. Only half an hour later my site has already peaked out due to "hit limit abuse". I think it is unacceptable that I can't promote my site without fear of it getting deactivated every day and pissing off potentially interested people who wish to see the content. I can hardly believe that this limit can be reached so quickly. I do not have and do not intend to have a traffic intensive site - the ratio between bandwidth and hit limit doesn't quite seem to correspond.

What solutions can anyone offer to this problem?
Does anyone know what PowWeb's official position is regarding increasing/removing hit limits?According to the official statments made when the hit limit was introduced a few months ago, they don't think of removing the limits. As for an increase, that wouldn't help when someone targets a website with malicious intent. What hosts have asked for, is that the lock wouldn't last the whole rest of the day, but drop at the end of the hour where the limit was reached.

You may want to check your access log, and determine who (which IP) was the source of the disruption and block that IP number, and the ISP it originated from, using htaccess settings.

[fluKe]

The official PowWeb respons would be something along the lines of:

PowWeb isn't in the business of hosting high traffic websites, they run a load balanced shared hosting package and in order to ensure the best service for all of their clients there is a set limit of requests for each website per hour. It is very unlikely that most websites will ever reach the request limit (infact less than 1%, I think off PowWebs sites have close this level of traffic). If you find yourself in the position of reaching this limit it may be time to think about moving on to a dedicated host/VPN which would better suit the needs of your site.


Or something along those lines. For the record I too am in favour of raising the hits limit or at least introducing a system whereby only persistant offenders have their site shut down. And I hate that a site gets shut down for a whole day, why not for the rest of that hour?

But that's the way it is here and if you need more resources then you may have to move on.

[ANewDepth]

According to the official statments made when the hit limit was introduced a few months ago, they don't think of removing the limits. As for an increase, that wouldn't help when someone targets a website with malicious intent. What hosts have asked for, is that the lock wouldn't last the whole rest of the day, but drop at the end of the hour where the limit was reached.

You may want to check your access log, and determine who (which IP) was the source of the disruption and block that IP number, and the ISP it originated from, using htaccess settings.
How do you block an IP address using the .htaccess file and can you do it without requiring everyone who accesses your website to put in a password?

[(jj)]

In your .htaccess file:

order deny,allow
deny from 123.456.78.90

or if you wish to block a domain name:

order deny,allow
deny from domain.com

[KarlFry]

How do you block an IP address using the .htaccess file and can you do it without requiring everyone who accesses your website to put in a password?

Just look through your access logs for the offending IP, and then use the code at the following URL to block the specific IP:

http://javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess5.shtml

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

I'm not absolutely sure about the logical flow of this code - i'm not an Apache guru - but you may need to put 'allow from all' as line 2 instead of 4, and then do the denys. Someone else may be able to clarify.

edit: heh, beat again ;)

-Karl F.
PowWeb Support
http://www.powweb.com

[Skunkboy]

With Karl's response, the advantage of the third line "deny from 012.34.5." is that if the leecher has an ever-changing IP, the one thing in common is their primary location. You can basically think of the last section as the actual node that the person is logged in on. If it's changing, then the first three parts of the IP being in the deny statement will prevent any from that host from accessing. The most common use for this is for dial-up or sometimes even DSL abusers.