Some Random Dude

That sucks! Hope it all sorts out OK!

We’re going to help you out here. Please contact us in some way with more details about the situation and your “theories”. Honestly, if you have to forgo Comment Love for this month, please do so. I can’t believe some ‘winner’ took the time to do this. I hope there is such a thing as karma.

It serves you right for hosting a leaked MP3 file, to a song you don’t fucking own.

better your ISP than the RIAA getting their hands on you for hosting pirated materail.

collis & kellie – Thanks so much guys, I will keep you in the loop as to what ends up happening.

Richard – You would have a very good point if the artist wasn’t the one that leaked it.

Hey Richard. Sounds logical at a quick glance. But here’s a word of wisdom: research before talking.

PJ wasn’t offering his readers a Metallica song. He was offering a song deliberately given away (free of charge) by the artist himself. Not to mention an artist who has an open source file of another song to download and remix to your hearts content. AND, an album in its entirety posted weeks before being released. Yes, Trent Reznor ultimately owns the song, but he’s given it to his audience to enjoy.

Seems like your hosting company should have a firewall or IDS to detect a surge in bandwidth coming from a single IP. I don’t think you’re running your own dedicated server, so I bet you don’t set up your own security. On a shared environment like the kind I think you’re on, I’d be very surprised if they didn’t have all sorts of protections against this very thing.

Plus, a simple email to you telling you that your limit was nearing (something which hosting companies usually do automatically — even my little old reseller business) would have alerted you in time to avoid this disaster. Isn’t this why you choose to host at a premium place rather than some fly-by-night company who don’t know what they’re doing? You, yourself, are not a monitoring program — they should have those installed on that server. I don’t think they dare ask you for any money, the issue is clearly one of their own negligence.

That IP is in a netblock belonging to a chinese ISP. It’s quite possible that it wasn’t one person, but thousands of people NATted behind the IP. That is quite common in the far east as they are starved for IPs (japan for instance has the same number of IPs for the whole country as IBM or AT&T have for just themselves).

If that is the case it’s a shame they didn’t use a caching proxy at their end.

And if it is the case look on the bright side: you’ve spread part of the ARG to an area of the world that could REALLY use that kind of thinking!

Damn PJ. Now you and Leah know what I had planned for the b-day celebration. :-(

Just kidding. I am glad this is over! I am requesting a techie article explaining what exactly happened. Was it a bug? Was it really the entire population of China scrambling to get their hands on the NIN single? Maybe it will help other people out there with websites to look out for problems like this.

What ISP do you use? Sounds like they’re reasonable.