The total reduction of 10's of gigabytes of bandwidth on my server alone due to bot stopping makes it easy to imagine that having such bot busting technology installed on every server in a datacenter could be an enormous savings in bandwidth second only to stopping spam. This technology could result in a small windfall for small hosting companies constantly being squeezed by service providers for more money by allowing even more customers on the same bandwidth currently being stolen without permission. Conceptually, blocking these leeches from an entire network could result in all sorts of additional savings.
The need to upgrade motherboards, especially for busy shared servers, could be significantly lessened. The older motherboards currently straining under the load, similar to how my newer dual Xeon was, would suddenly be more than adequate to continue to grow a business without any additional equipment expenditure. Being able to get a little more juice out of older equipment could allow datacenters to spend more on infrastructure instead of further lining the pockets of service providers.
Now the problem is how do you sell a product to hosting companies that could actually impact their revenues by cutting bandwidth usage which results in additional charges?
Simple.
Offer the bot busting technology as an additional paid service labelled as a content and copyright control technology that reduces the ability of scrapers and aggregators from using their content without permission.
Seems like a natural for a control panel plug-in for Plesk, CPanel, etc.
More revelations coming soon.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Bot Busting Could Have Significant Savings
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3 comments:
Throw the tits on the table, please. Stop torturing victims. You've created a market, now deliver;)
Well keep your pants on and leave my tits out of this as my PHP skills aren't what they should be as I wrote this in something else.
It would certainly be more effective as an Apache add-on, ala mod_throttle, but then webmasters and web hosts would be way more hesistant to run it.
Believe it or not I'm not running a big infommercial yet, you're just hearing my trials and tribulations as I'd hate to unleash anything that whacks legitimate users.
If anything, what I'm running could best be described as a prototype to convert into a product if that were to happen.
At a minimum, it's been the most fun I've had programming in a long time!
Bill, I do appreciate that you share so much info, and the funny writing making each post about a blocked scraper a great read. Indeed you're creating appetite:) Yesterday I had the first short outage caused by a cpl assholes crawling my stuff totally senseless, so I wished I could stop them as elegant as you do it already.
I know a programmer who has a lot of experience in that field from protecting adult content a few years back. He wrote Apache modules before and 'speaks' PHP, Perl and whatever. If you want I can try to connect him to you.
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