I'm in the process of creating a very rich content and image site of some 500 pages. I'm wanting to know is it possible to make some sort of download limit protection, say 5mb per user per hour, that will block the user afterwards once they exceed? I'm afraid that once I put the site up some cunning person will just download the lot and mkae their own site off my work
It will be difficult to do anything that is robust and cannot be byepassed without the greatest amount of effort but a basic system would be simple enough to do.
Actually i do something very similar based off IP address. My limit is to 5 downloads before i make you signup for free. I do this at my free fonts site. Have a look as example: http://free-fonts.sustainedhits.com/ What i do is, tag the IP address and store into MYSQL db. I then +1 each time a font is downloaded. You could easily take the byte count of a file and store that into the DB as well. You could then do a check on the BYTE count if it exceeds X and toss them to signup or limits reached page. As I said it took me all of 30 minutes to code the system you see above. Changing it for Byte count versus "downloaded" would not be do bad.
Though as said, an IP based system is very easy to byepass given the majority of people have dynamic IPs so simply need to disconnect from the net and reconnect then will have another full 5 sets of downloads. You can build up on this to make it slightly stronger but not much easily
Not true. Disconnecting internet connection will not re-new your IP in most cases (DSL/CABLE). You can add a cookie for the user, but again, there is no fool proof way. Peace,
Your best solution is to make them register, use your database to log and limit them then use a cron at midnight to refresh their download limits.