site using to much bandwith

hey
I'm beginning to get bandwith problems with my site. It used 47g out of my 50gb bandwith. This happend after I added some small videos to the site (aprox. 1mb each)
Should I make in a members only secktion (the videos) So users have to register (free) before they can view them or what should I do ? :-/

- bart

I dont think moving the file to member area for free registeration will use less bandwidth you need to request more bandwidth or add the file in another place where users can download without using your bandwidth

Video will always cause a bandwidth spike, making it members only will slow down random consumption a little. Take a look at your logs & determine how many of the hits are comming from external sources, if you have that taken care of the only other options are getting more bandwidth & making the videos pay for themselves in some way, shape or form. Or.. dropping the videos.

It is does random hits that are the problem.
Many people post links to my site in forums and stuff like that.

i would also recommend using htaccess to block hotlinkers as videos tend to be ripped more often. You probably should look at your referrer stats and be sure you don't have a few forums or emails or newsgroups linking directly to your videos. Doing this alone would save you bandwidth, and as joe said, a members section is really ineffective with this sort of thing.

//What would the code be for the .htaccess file?

Lol. yeah but you still got 3 gb left...

haven't got any bandwih left
So now my site is dead for 3 days :'-(

Never mind. I found out what I needed.

open notepad with a new, blank file. paste this in:

change domain.com to the domain you want to allow. Save the file.

When the save window comes up, click the bottom drop down menu and change it to 'All Files.' then, in the name field, type .htaccess. Make sure that .txt is not on the end of it. Save it where you want, and upload to the directory you want to protect. DO NOT PUT IT IN THE ROOT. Make sure you upload it as an ascii file and not binary as well.

Let me know how that works.

//moved to hosting

So if I added this to my htaccess then people can only get access to my site, if they typed my domain in the address bar?

No, if you add the htaccess file, it will prevent people from hotlinking the videos to there sites etc...

I allready did some hotlinking protection. so I don't think that it would be the problem :-/
one of the movies has been shown 21473 times hehe but it's only 387.9 KB hehe.

my point was that what if half of those 21473 views were coming from other sites directly linking to the video? don't you think that would be a huge difference in your outgoing bandwidth if you could cut that off? using manual htaccess is the most effective way to prevent hotlinking. If you used cpanel to set it up, it may not work properly unfortunately.