Exceeding bandwidth

I don't know if this is the right form, but this question is bugging me.

You have a site, maybe a blog. Lets say its a good read overall, sometimes controversial. You get linked on fark.com for an interesting something or another on your site, and in a matter of a few hours you've grossly exceeded your bandwidth, and by the time you even find out about it, your tens of thousands of dollars in the hole.

I've just checked with my host and looked into a few other ones, and there aren't any really good options to protect from being linked from a site like fark. What would you do to prevent this from happening, and what could you do if it does happen. I know I don't have that kind of money laying around to pay a bandwidth overage like that.

If it does happen what we suggest to customers is to make a low bandwidth version of the page linked if you wish for it to be displayed. Remove any dynamic, graphics and other content that increases the bandwidth and knock it down to be as small a page as possible.

Think back to 9/11 when cnn.com had 1 page that was black text and white background.

Thats all well and good, but for someone like me whose web presence is small, and traffic is consistantly low, by the time I made a low bandwidth version of a page, the damage would already be done. Sure its responsible to monitor your usage, but some people don't have the privelage to monitor thier websites while thier at work, so there is the possibility of eight hours where no action is taken.

I'm thinking of some system to block requests at a certain point - "Bandwidth exceeded, please try again tommorrow" kind of thing. Even if I took the page down, wouldn't a "page not found" page still crank up the bandwidth?

The story I heard, which brings me to starting this thread, was a someone submitted a "boobie" link to fark, and ended up with a bill of $185,000 and some change. Could this really happen?

A simple page just saying "page not found" would not use up much bandwidth. I'd prefer setting up a page saying temporarly down before I put up a page saying "page not found".

So I guess that racking up a bandwidth bill into the thousands of dollars, let alone $185,000 would be difficult to do.

I dropped back for a moment, and figured if I had a webpage with a total of 5megabytes in content, and one day I collect 1,000,000 million hits, and at the price of extra bandwidth per month from my host - $10.00/10gigabytes, I would rack up roughly $490 if I was charged the up front fee, not including my alotted 50gb.

Now would it be possible to maintain this kind of traffic for several days from an unfortunate traffic driver like fark.com, to some poor guys blog that happend to have something cool?

Is the $185,000 in bandwidth penalties the making of an old wives tale?

I think most hosts are also a bit understanding the first time it happens. Also if a server gets farked then most server admins will know as the server will be bogged and services could be knocked offline. I believe you can have your host use mod_bandwidth if you wish for your site to be knocked off at a certain level.