Hit them where it hurts the most
September 2, 2008 – 4:10 pmIn the old days, when a group of kiddies wanted to drop a website, they gathered up and they all sent ICMP packets to it till it dropped.
Nowadays you can’t do that anymore because webhosts got smart and they are using tools that disables this threat.
The thing webhosts didn’t figure out yet is that at the end of the month, everything comes down to Bandwidth.
Bandwidth is the key that holds webhosts by its balls, each webhost limits their users to a certain amount of bandwidth (There are some that allows a huge amount of bandwidth, but it is not common). The average bandwidth of a small website travels between 10-30gb per month.
If you go over the limit, the webhost will shut your website down till the following month (where the quota renews).
Webhosts do so because bandwidth is really expensive, and they cannot afford clients to take as much as they like.
Some webhosts sell “unmetered” bandwidth hosting packages, which are VERY expensive and they are targetted for specific clients who has a lot of visitors (100,000+, depends on the size/nature of the website).
Some webhosts on the other hand sell bandwidth according to the amount you used every month. Meaning if you used 10gb this month they will charge you for 10gb. They will never shut your website down, even if you got to 100gb this month, becuase you will pay for the whole 100gb.
My point is, by using a very simple method of downloading (and redownloading every second) the web pages of a website constantly, you can easily break the bandwidth limit of a website and shut it down, or in other cases you can make people shut their own website down because they end up paying thousands of dollars to the webhosting company.
Lets do the math:
10mbit line can produce 1.25mbps
1.25×60 = 75MB per minute
75×60 = 4500MB per hour
4500×24 = 108000MB per day
108GB per day. Using just one 10mbit line.
108GB is the MONTHLY bandwidth limit for most small-mid websites.
Of course, the line of the website also has to be at least 10mbit.
The only thing a webhost can do, is to block your IP address (or IP block).
If you have a dynamic IP address, you win. If you don’t, you lose.
You can use Metaproducts Offline Explorer or ever wget to do so.
Simple, yet dangerous.