Traffic burst
Yesterday, I noticed that my website performance was a bit slow. Later that night, websites were not even loading. The server was up, as was LiteSpeed. Turns out some people from China had used my image hosting site to host their animated GIF avatars, ranging from 200 to 600+KB each. On a high traffic forum, this led to a huge spike in traffic due to the huge number of requests. Yesterday’s traffic hit 160GB over 24 hours. Amazingly, LiteSpeed was still handling the requests. I was trying to tweak it so that other websites would not be affected by the lack of connections, but was unable to do so, so I deleted one of the high bandwidth image and went to bed. This morning, I checked the traffic stats and saw that the site pushed traffic of over 160GB over 24 hours, even with one of the images deleted with a third of the day left.
Some thoughts I have now: how to tweak LiteSpeed properly so that one site does not affect the rest; should I stop the image hosting site; or do I keep the site but add some bandwidth/data transfer restrictions?
Update: The users were back at it, pushing 20+Mbps (~2+MB/s) and basically DoS-ing my server. Well, nothing major, just that it was using up all available connections (I’m using the free LiteSpeed). I had to block the China IP range, which brought my server back to normal. Apologies to any legitimate users. I don’t have the time to tweak the server or the site now.