[Ythan]

hello -

i recently visited xboxmediacenter.de and noticed the site is offline until the end of the month due to bandwidth issues. as a site administrator myself, i know how easy it is to burn through bandwidth and how expensive it can be to raise your quota. although i'll be happy to make another donation to help cover hosting costs, i would also like to offer a suggestion which could help your site deal with increased traffic as xbmc grows in popularity.

coral cache is a transparent web caching proxy which uses peer-to-peer technology. by appending ".nyud.net:8090" to any domain name the site will be served from their cache, significantly reducing bandwidth demands on the original host. for instance, instead of linking to http://manual.xboxmediacenter.de/ you could link to http://manual.xboxmediacenter.de.nyud.net:8090/ which would effectively offload any requests for the xbmc manual to the coral cache servers. this can be done for pretty much any static content including images.

due to its peer-to-peer nature, coral cache has high availability meaning you won't have to worry about the site being down and breaking your links. its cached copies are updated immediately whenever a site's content changes, so you can update your site normally. it serves an exact copy of the document without tacking on any obnoxious ads or banners. indeed, the only downside i've discovered in my testing has been that cached pages are sometimes slightly slower to load than the originals.

i highly recommend that you look into utilizing coral cache on your site, at least to serve the most highly-demanded and bandwidth-intensive documents. i think it could do a lot to help you stay within your monthly quota.

best regards and keep up the great work!

-y

[Hullebulle]

normal traffic isn't an issue but this time either the hoster did a mistake (but he don't think he did  ) or the server got compromised cause we had 150gb traffic in on a single day 7hrs  :nuts:.

and i am not running into a limit, but after our free traffic is used it is getting quite expensive and since i am paying the server with my own money (donated to the team) my "pay for a round" mood decreases with every gb i am over this limit.  

but thanx for your hint io will look into this for the remaining 14 days of my billing period.  

[Ythan]

wow, that sucks... i have actually had similar things occur on my site when a disgruntled user decides to launch a ddos attack. the worst ones maxed out around 80 mbps which can really eat through your bandwidth! i don't know why anybody would have an axe to grind with xbmc but it might be worth your while to check your server logs for any suspicious activity. if you really did receive an inordinate amount of traffic you may want to look into something like mod_dosevasive to help protect apache against certain kinds of attacks. you could also ask your host to cap your connection at a reasonable speed (like 3 or 4 mbps) to prevent your usage from getting too out of control (that's what we ended up doing). anyway good luck and sorry to hear about the overage. if you pm me your paypal address i can kick you a few bucks to help with the costs.

-y

[Ythan]

oh and one other thing, i don't know how much traffic this site receives but i'm sure it's pretty substantial. on my site we make about $10/day with google adwords banners at the bottom of our pages. it's really unobtrusive and it pays half of our hosting fees without any work for us except signing up. i don't know what your guys' position is on advertising but it might be something to consider. xbmc is a great project and i'm sure any additional resources would help.

-y