Home Page Forums MAME MAME Abuse by IP 95.216.99.153

Over the last few days a single IP – 95.216.99.153 – has downloaded approximately 270GB of traffic from forums.bannister.org.

I noticed today when my web host warned me I was approaching my monthly quota of 400GB.

I have applied an IP ban to stop the bleed, but I'm warning folks ahead of time that I may have to take the site offline for a few days towards the end of the month in order to avoid excess usage charges.

I'm happy to keep the site online if the culprit sends over a payment to cover the charges. Feel free to reach out to me directly.

I apologise for the inconvenience caused.

It's a Hetzner VPS in Helsinki, RDNS says hel3.aktheknight.co.uk. Presumably something controlled by this dude: https://www.aktheknight.co.uk/

Oh, he's running ArchiveBot on his VPS. It doesn't handle UBB very well, because it follows all the post links that often take you back to the same page. UBB is kind of silly with the way its links work, but ArchiveBot is kind of dumb with its strategy for walking them, too.

The person involved has been in touch.

Thanks.

Do you have a guess on the cost if you do hit the cap to keep it running?

If a couple of guys with an IRC bot and minimal budget are able to cost you serious money without even noticing while they download 100 other sites, that's a sign your hosting provider is probably ripping you off

So you're offering to host the forums, right? Or are you just trying to compete with your buddy Jason over at the Internet Archive for who can be the most needlessly abrasive?

The thing is, Hetzner only charges for outgoing data. If you’re only sending small requests that generate large responses, you can make it hell for the other guy while spending very little

Fun fact, the back end database for this forum is a little less than 400MB. That tells me that the code that was used to scrape here was more than a little broken.

can you recommend a better hosting provider? just a good one in its own right.