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?!?!
find which host is using big amount of bandwidth using your hosted images and block hotlinking for it.
yes enable hotlinking protection (in cPanel if you have it) and report it to 1and1 and see what they do, not a good chance they'll let you off because the bandwidth has been used and somebody's got to pay for it... But you never know they might be a little lenient
well if you talk to them now you might be able to buy some bandwidth booster packs or something and get them prorated backwards. My host - ServINT - has helped me with that before. None the less do it before the month is over. MAtt
well, i've emailed 1and1 about it to no avail. I must front the bill and I don't really blame 1and1. My mistake for not keeping track of my bandwidth (or checking my email). I just really didnt expect to go over my bandwidth as I have always used only about half of my limit. BTW, this thread is in the first page of Google's SERPs for "1and1 bandwidth". Not bad for a 2 day old thread.
Nope begging will not work, even HostGator out sources their bandwidth through another provider. I think you'll find that 1and1 have to pay someone else for their bandwidth aswell.
Hindsight is 20/20. You should have done you homework on starting an image hosting site. See if your file hosting program will let you limit users bandwidth. Most of the better ones do. I doubt you will get any relief from your host on the bill. Also set up your 1and1 expense notifier to email you when excessive bandwidth is happening. Live and learn.
It is looking like you will just have to pay the $400 and learn from your mistakes. In today's world you have to protect each and every venture that you start as there will always be someone willing to pull you down just for fun. I would not expect 1and1 to help you out here because at the end of the day your account has used this extra bandwidth and someone has to pay for it.
Ouch that stinks, but as others have said ..you need hard limits when it comes to image hosting. I have a monthly limit per-account or else it would get abused.
This doesn't make sense. You have an image hosting site for sites to host their images so that they can save on their bandwidth and when there is a site that just does this, but uses to much of your bandwidth you want to block it for hotlinking on the images when infact it's most probably their image in the first place. They are just using your site to store the image to cut their hosting costs. Not sure, but it seems you were not quite sure what you may have been getting into when starting a site like this. I say this because you always see people asking where they can store their images so that they don't have to host them and therefore will save on bandwidth and people always suggest places like imagesack or what ever it's call. Because it's an image hosting site people believe that they can store their images and link to them that way to save the bandwidth most of the time. Unfortunately as much as it may hurt you and I am sorry that this has happened, but I don't think 1 and 1 will tell you that you don't have to pay it as you were the one that should have been responsible for looking at your bandwidth and storage space and all they are doing is providing you a hosting service which you have used by the sounds of things. Good luck with this anyway and that's one reason I don't have an image hosting site.
Need to use many php scripts available such as the rest of the big dogs do in the image hosting world to only let each image use so much bandwidth daily, monthly, or for an extended period of time until it reaches its limit then it will not show up anymore. With image hosting and file hosting websites make sure you have all of that done as well as a captcha system set up because I have seen attacks on smaller image hosting sites where they will upload thousands of pictures and use them for their message board spamming techniques over thousands of message boards
One thing you could do is use a robots.txt allowing only few search engines read the image files. For example picsearch.com will download your images and create a thumbnail version of it for people to search. That thumbnail image will be saved in their web server. If you don't like spiders like this access certain resources of your website you can specify that on your robots.txt. Here is link for how to setup robots.txt if you need: http://cosmocentral.com/page/robotstxt-Setup-for-Search-Engine-Spiders.aspx
Exactly. Or you may be able to htaccess. All depends on what is going on with the hotlinking. But sounds like you are up grief alley.
I think you're out of luck in this case and are going to need to pay the bill. If your site was hacked and a malicious user used the bandwidth I could see there being a reason for 1and1 to not charge you for the extra bandwidth used. But your sites actual service used the bandwidth so it would be tough to argue that it's not your fault. I would still however try to get a discount for the bandwidth since it's quite a bit. They may be willing to give you a discount for bulk purchase. That's about all I have for suggestions with this.