Limit traffic

[DNGeeks]

I've got a problem with one of my sites. Apparently once in a while a user decides he/she wants to use a ton of bandwidth.

I haven't checked the raw logs to see what's going on and one big problem is I have raw logs deleted daily at the moment (I've changed that now). But for example one user made 231671 hits in one day yet only hit 426 files. This is completely unacceptable as it is clearly abuse.

I'm also not entirely clear (since I don't have raw logs) as to what those users are doing. It's not like they're spidering the entire site with some download tool.

I don't want to do anything that might damage my standings in any search engines either. I have been hammered by search engines before, and seen thousands of hits in a day from them, especially msn.

Below are the top two user agents for the last two months. Obviously I could deny by user agent, but that may limit legitimate traffic.

November
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; AT&T CSM6.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET

October
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)


Any thoughts or suggestions? Go ahead and ask questions if you need to, I want to get this issue fixed.