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Since almost all my websites are now hosted at home behind a not-too-bright ADSL link with 1 megabit upstream I sometimes wonder about what I'll do when something I host gets slashdotted. I don't write that much which might suddenly be interesting but sometimes the intarwebs decide something else.I do have a server at work with enough upstream bandwidth, but I will not use that server for anything which would remotely be interpretable as 'commercial'. So I could only use that server when it would involve for example the weather maps.
Another solution for bandwith-hogging binaries would be to host them on my xs4all homepage which has enough space. But copying stuff over there would be a lot of work or take some serious scripting.What could be interesting (in the case of images or other binary stuff causing the problem) is trying Coral Cache which can be done using some simple mod_rewrite tricks as noted in Saving Bandwidth and Preventing Hotlinking With Coral Cache. The note about not using Coral Cache when not being slashdotted is true: the demo image loads slower at the moment. The article is from August 2007.
Anyway, this is all very very theory: even when a comment on an article on a very popular site linked to a file on the bbs archive it still didn't cause any real trouble.
Update : A small test does not give me a lot of confidence in Coral Cache:koos@kolham:~$ host idefix.net.nyud.net nyud.net has DNAME record http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net. idefix.net.nyud.net is an alias for idefix.net.http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net. idefix.net.http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net is an alias for http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net. http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net has address 200.19.159.35 http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net has address 169.229.50.3 http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net has address 171.66.3.182 Host http.l2.l1.l0.nyucd.net not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) koos@kolham:~$ host idefix.net.nyud.net Host idefix.net.nyud.net not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) koos@kolham:~$ host idefix.net.nyud.net Host idefix.net.nyud.net not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)Seems like their DNS and the local resolver dislike eachother.