How to prevent mass downloading?

and don't harm to search engines spiders.

[a_sh]

Users with highspeed channels and "website download" programs forces my website to go almost down from time to time.
Are there any free solutions to limit such activity without harm to search spiders, like googlebot?

[stapel]

In your .htaccess file, you can ban downloaders using code such as:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*attach.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Ants.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*BackWeb.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Bandit.*$ [NC,OR] 
... 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Wget.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Whacker.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Widow.*$ [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{X-moz} ^prefetch [NC,OR] 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Microsoft\Data\Access\Internet\Publishing\Provider.*$ [NC] 
RewriteRule ^.* - [F]

The "NC" means "no case", so upper-versus-lower case letters won't matter. The "OR" means "or", so omit this from your last listing. The last line, the "rule", says "fail", so they won't get your pages.

Hope that helps a bit.

Eliz.

P.S. No, there is no requirement that things be listed alphabetically. But it can make it easier for you to review your listing later, if necessary.

[a_sh]

It's fine, but most downloaders didn't supply proper user-agent headers. They are IE, Mozilla,.... according to my website logs.

Are there solutions with determination of high load from IP, or banning due to hit to honeytrap....?

[stapel]

If you don't want to depend on the user-agent being declared, then, yes, you'll probably need some sort of honeypot link near the top of your pages.

Eliz.