Bandwidth fine question
 

My websites (together) do somewhere around 1 TB a month bandwidth. One of my websites started generating huge bandwidth due (mainly) to hotlinking. My webhost tells me that he is being fined $2500 for the additional bandwidth because the MB/(minute?) or something went from 3 to over 5 taking him from tier 2 to tier 4. This must've happened over a very short period since the max all my sites together ever did in a day is roughly double what I normally do. Does this seem right?

I dont think that he was fined, but has to pay for the usage just like you do.

A lot of Hosting companies simply buy rack servers and then resell the hosting and bandwidth. In your case because you got raped on your binaries (aka hotlinked) he got hit with an excessive bandwidth charge and will probably come back to you to pay it. Eitherway expect your acccount to be terminated!

The solution is to host your binaries (images and movies) on another server that has unlimited bandwidth or that can limit to what countries you will server. You probably don't need to be sending binaries to china or such, probably only USA, Canada, AU, EU, and perhaps the middle east.

Best of luck to you.

if a site is hotlinking your images, you can block that.

Use htaccess to stop hotlinking:

First of all there is no such thing as Unlimited bandwidth, it is a myth. There may be some hosts that advertise it but send an account to them like this where someone actually starts to use a lot of BW and see how long they last.

Secondly if you want a host that would love to see you burning high amounts of BW (so long as your ROI increases then it is always a great thing) then hit me up about what Caro.Net has to offer, you won't go wrong on the network home of AEBN.

Also, for your high BW projects take a look at our Caro.Net Unmetered Packages !

I say you're going to need to find another host :)

Thanks for all the responses. He was fine with me staying as long as I paid the fine. Yes, I put the code into my sites directly afterwards and haven't had any problems since. My problem is, it just seems like an egregious fine for like 1 day's activity and I would've hoped that the server would have some sort of guard against this sort of thing and shut down or something. I guess I'll pay the fine. Damn!

That dollar amount does seem high. I'd take a look at your agreement with him,
then possibly offer him a different amount.

Hit me up on my ICQ or email and we can discuss your bandwidth issue and get you into a NationalNet program that won't penalize you for any overages you might incur.