Download Accelerators

[Etma]

I get a small number of hits on my site that originate from download accelerators. Is this a bad thing and, if so, can I do something to block them? A related question - what is crawler.de? I get hits from there which seem rather suspicious - typically attempts to access scripts and ini files that don't actually exist.

Thanks in advance for any tips on the subject.

[thecoalman]

Depends on your definition of bad, for the average page most of the bandwidth of a page is taken up by images and realistically is the only place where further compression will speed it up significantly. These "Accelerators" commonly used by AOL and other ISP's further compress images on computer in their network and substitute the compressed image for the one on your server before sending it to the browser. Not sure if that applies to other popular accelerators since they have to be processed.

The bad part is since any competent webmaster has already taken the time to compress images to an acceptable size without ruing the quality of the image the resultant image that has been compressed by the ISP is generally quite poor.

As far as blocking them I'm sure that's possible but you would be blocking legitimate users from seeing your site.