Can visitors abuse my bandwidth?

[johnneumann]

I am just about to begin the process of building my first website. I'm as green as they come.

I plan to put up some downloadable videos and audios that promote my services and I know that when someone downloads a file, it gobbles up bandwidth.

A while back I heard of a guy who had a vendetta against a company he didn't like and he programmed his computer to dial their 800 every minute. This went on for a couple of months before he got popped. Apparently, the guy had done about $15,000 damage to the company's phone bill before he got caught.

So, can people do this with downloading videos off my site and thereby consuming my bandwidth? If I have someone who has it out to get me, do they just need to repeatedly download my stuff to start creating problems for me? I'm talking about a deliberate extreme repetition of downloads.

It sounds so easy to mess with a website that way. Does it work that way?

Again, I've never run a site, so I don't know the system yet.

[bill]

You can block IP addresses or limit access in a number of different ways. You just need to watch your logs.

[Mahoney1]

If it does become a problem, maybe you could implement a system that requires the user to register before they can download the files.

Regards
Mike

[johnneumann]

Has this ever happened to any of you?