Preventing Excessive Bandwidth Usage

prevent file requests from malicious users

[firefly2442]

I was looking through my logs just now and I noticed that someone (I assume some sort of bot) accessed a ZIP file I have posted on my site about 2000 times in one hour. Is there anything I can do server-side to prevent this? It's a direct link to the file and I would like to keep it that way if possible. Obscuring the link with some PHP code would probably work but I don't really want to have to resort to this. Any thoughts? Thanks.

[bill]

If it's an Apache server you could block the referrer via your .htaccess

[ethnicomm]

This might help [webmasterworld.com...]

[henry0]

I use a flood control class
search for flood control, server flood control etc...

If a request is made more than x times (x is up to you)
then exit()
you could log the IP but if it comes from a proxy then...