I've got a very low traffic site so I'm generally not worried about bandwidth all that much. As everyone knows, however, posting the right thing on a blog will get you dugg nowadays and it's easy to take a real hit on bandwidth usage in that case. My main concern is accidentally running up a large bill if that was ever to happen. Secondly, I would like to keep the site up as much as possible.

First of all how does this normally work? Will linode do any sort of limiting? Also, what are some of the solutions that others have put in place to safeguard themselves from bankrupcy?

Thanks!

It seems unlikely you'd exceed 100GB (assuming you have the small Linode 256 plan), even after being dugg. You'd need to be hosting a decent bunch of pictures/videos to approach that limit, at which point you'd be charged $0.50/GB for additional transfer. As far as I know there are no limits on how much additional transfer your Linode can use so it would be possible to break the bank, if unlikely!

Good to know. I just get worried any time I see a possibility for my wallet becoming thinner

Im sure as a potential stopfix.. u could make iptables count bandwidth and when u hit ur total stop everything..
im not sure if iptables has the ability to generate emails, but u could write a cron job to check the iptables count, and if it is getting high report it

_________________
ServerAdmin - www.our-lan.com
"Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy whilst looking for a really big stick"
"In my experiece, any attempt to make any system idiot proof will only challenge God to make a better idiot"

Once when I generated a lot of traffic on my linode, I got a note from an admin asking me if my vps had been hacked.

It hadn't, but my usage was unusual, and they noticed.

I don't want to tell you that you could count on linode letting you know, because I don't know if you can. But they did notice when my traffic spiked up, and they did ask me about it.

I once posted 20+ high res pictures on an image board once... bandwidth went though the roof... used 10GB in a matter of 24 hours. Then the thread died and my bandwidth went back to normal. Its good to know that my linode can widthstand bandwidth spikes

Thanks,
Smark

One other thing you might try is putting up a robots.txt file. For more information on how to set it up:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Not all crawlers honors robots.txt since it's voluntary, so keep that in mind. Still, it's quick and easy to put up and doesn't hurt anything.

Look here to see what I mean:

http://64.22.109.195/1/bw.html

It starts/stops my webpages depending on how much transfer I have left for the month. You're welcome to copy it.