lots of downloads from one IP..

[Sol_HSA]

Recently I've been seeing thousands of downloads a day for one of my games from a single IP. Reverse DNS says it's "293.hostxtrem.com" - does anyone have any idea what might be going on?

[berserker]

Anonymous proxy server?

[Sharpfish]

If he's soaking up bandwidth make sure you stick him in your .htaccess file. THe only reference on google I could find had the word "Spam" attached so make your own mind up.

Edit, "soaking up bandwidth" is my catch-all for bandwidth wasters, email harvesters, scraper bots and unruly bots in general that have no useful reason to be hitting your site (and messing your stats up). My .htaccess file is longer than my arm and full of these idiot-bots (and some-non-bots).

[Sol_HSA]

I doubt the bandwidth is a problem, just worried about the statistics..

The game in question is the one I wrote for Assembly this year, and it's downloads have been increasing steadily, and really jumped last week (from about a couple dozen a day to hundreds a day to thousands a day). Out of about 11000 downloads, 4000 have come through the same IP so far.

If something like 90% of the downloads came from the same IP, I'd block it, but the downloads have been increasing generally as well. Of course, if there's some large community that just happens to use the same anonymizer proxy that has found the game, it would explain it, but still feels somewhat odd..

I'll wait a couple weeks and see what the stats look like then.

Based on tracert, the servers are in texas, even though the domain name is owned by some italian hosting company.. =) As such, I don't know about the spam angle. I think it's more likely that someone who spams has bought services from the hosting company than that the hosting company itself is a spam house..

[MrQ]

That's pretty wierd. I'm guessing by Assembly you mean the Assembly parties. (FC FTW! ;) )
It looks like the ip is an euro host, of some sort. http://www.hostxtrem.com/
Could this be users connected from a big lan party? possibly the Assembly party itself or another large lan party?

I don't keep track of these parties anymore, but I used to be quite active in the demo scene back in the 90's. Good to see its still going! :)

[soniCron]

Your logs should give you specifics about the requests. The single best thing you can do is look at what browsers are being reported. If the requests are all using the same browser, or none at all, it's likely a bot and should be banned. I had the same problem a few months ago - another from a ###.hostname.com and eventually determined it was bad news - banned it.

[soniCron]

I've found a use for your bot (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?p=111512#post111512)! ;)

[Sol_HSA]

I tried to check whether there were any demo parties last week, but nothing seemed to be going on in Italy at least. The weird download spike lasted only about 144 hours, and things seem to be back to more or less normal hundreds-of-downloads-a-day level.