Digg Effect

[Camo.Fish]

I am just wondering what the best way to handle this would be? It has not been an issue for me for a while, but a few years back I had a site that got absolutely hammered with image viewing the two weeks surrounding an event for which I had done a site for. I had to upgrade the bandwidth package multiple times because the account kept going over limit and shutting down. My actual DIS account still had bandwidth, but the account that I had created for them did not.

Afterwards, I considered writing a monitoring program that would text msg me as a site went over 50, 75, 85, 90% usages on disk and bandwidth but never got around to it (although if there is interest, I still could..).

Is there already a mechanism in place for such an occurrence, or is diligent monitoring the only way?

[Frank Hagan]

By "image viewing" do you mean actual visits to the site? Or by people linking to the images to display on another site (such as Google images)?

Not sure you can do much about a temporary surge in the number of visits to the site. You can limit "hot linking" of images by other sites through CPanel ("hotlink protection").

I think Cpanel or WHM does have a notification feature set at 80% of bandwidth (or perhaps its Dathorn ...) I have gotten the notifications before, allowing me to react proactively rather than after the site has exceeded bandwidth.

[Camo.Fish]

Actual site visitors scrolling through a gallery was the issue, not hot linking. I think I did set up a way to notify myself, but was unable to respond in time, several times, for various reasons... it was seriously getting pounded.