Hello everyone,

Haven’t posted on this blog in a while. And I would not be typing this post, either. But it’s out of necessity, much less an announcement that would generally be exciting.

Most of you, if not all, have noticed the troubles we’ve been having with Hotfile in the past couple days. Randomly failing link generations and such. Initially, it was Hotfile not sending back the correct response to our server which would result in a dead link. Or at least, that is what we thought. We decided to dig deeper earlier yesterday and we found out that Hotfile would consistently ban/block our server(s) randomly.

We have been using the database server to generate Hotfile links and the download servers then download those links. Hotfile, being a popular service/site, gets used a lot on RPNet. With the number of users on RPNet increasing by the day, it’s only obvious that there would be more Hotfile links being generated all day long. This causes a flood of requests and Hotfile bans our server (although only temporarily) time and again.

We fixed this issue yesterday by making the download servers generate the links instead of the database. That would route requests on 2 servers, instead of 1. That would mean the load on Hotfile would be distributed between 2 servers, not 1 and we would have lesser chances of getting banned.

That theory was fine and it worked, for about 12-18 hours. Today, one of our clients reported issues with downloading Hotfile, and on looking into the issue we found out that Hotfile had banned/blocked both our download servers. There’s obviously not as much load on Hotfile from one server, but we figure there’s enough on both servers individually to trigger a Hotfile ban.

We don’t know the threshold. We don’t know at what ‘point’ Hotfile bans the server temporarily due to an overload of requests. We don’t know what Hotfile considers an ‘overload’. So our only option, at this point, is to somehow test, trial, error and then find out the limit.

We’re doing exactly that at this moment. We’ve limited Hotfile links to 20 per user for all users. We’ll gradually increase that and see at what point we get banned by Hotfile for a connection flood.

Dman has also suggested (in fact, he’s trying to persuade me) that we drop support for Hotfile completely. Over the past couple months we’ve spent a lot of time and resources on maintaining Hotfile. Time and resources that we could have otherwise spent on better developing RPNet and a lot of features that we have been missing out on and putting a hold on. Hotfile has seriously been a real pain for us over the past couple months. They’re one of the most notorious filehost out there.

Fortunately, they have not permanently banned us just yet, so we’re not forced to drop it. However, if we DO get banned (permanently) by Hotfile in the future, we will NOT be able to support it again as it’s neither feasible nor practical to switch servers (and datacenters) because of a Hotfile ban.

Basically, if you see issues and kinks with Hotfile in the coming couple days, please don’t be surprised. We’re going to try and fix this issue somehow, although there is no guarantee of anything at this moment regarding Hotfile. Blame Hotfile for this. We would love to play fair, but Hotfile does not want to.