Download Managers giving grey hair...

[tajutondarra]

First of thank you for this great forum. Even though this is my first post, I have been browsing this forum for some time trying to find answers without any luck so I just thought to post my question.

I am webmastering a site that has quite a heavy download traffic. We transfer approximately 300-500 gigabytes on daily basis. We were suffering on hotlinking but those days are behind us now. htaccess does the work for us just fine.

However the thing that bothers me are those darn Download Managers that consume tons of connections (like yesterday someone had over 200 simultaneus connections and all downloads were done in partial content 206). I would like to keep things fair and square with all our downloaders so I was just wondering if there is any way to make those Download Managers life's a bit more difficult?

Since most of the Download Managers are capable of disguising themselves into browsers I don't think we can disable any user_agents but is there any way to modify Apache's httpd.conf in a way that it wouldn't allow connections coming from same ip rapidly?

Any help would be highly appreciated.

Tajutondarra

[jdMorgan]

tajutondarra,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!

I'd suggest you investigate options like mod_throttle to limit the download rate.

Also, member xlcus posted this php script [webmasterworld.com] intended to limit connections.

Jim