I've got a bit of a rough situation to relate to you all tonight. I'm sure that nearly all of you now know about the lost MacWorld nVidia/Halo movie which Cannibal Harry happened to record and post up at his site. The nVidia advertisement was a bit of a sensation in July when it came out, but it received much more attention during this last month when several large gaming news sites posted direct links to his file. The original movie had been misplaced for awhile, and so his copies (one at 45 megabytes, one at 32) were for a few months the only ones available to the public. Now you know the background.
Well, a few days ago CH received a $6,000 bill from Earthlink for 62 gigabytes of bandwidth in July. (This was when interest in the files was pretty much limited to the Bungie fan community) He was, needless to say, a bit shocked.
It wasn't until the following day that Cannibal Harry thought to check up on the movies' download statistics in the time since July. He was under the 500 megabyte bandwidth limit for the month of August, but will be receiving a whopping $24,000 bill for 4.5 terabytes (4,500 gigabytes) of bandwidth done in September. *blink-blink!... gulp!*
The obvious questions are: why didn't Earthlink at the very least inform him that he was sucking down THAT much bandwidth... and why didn't they have a cap on the amount of bandwidth or file requests that can be taken for any given file? From what another sysadmin has told me, the fees that Earthlink is charging for the amount of bandwidth are completely rediculous. Draw your own conclusions.
Cannibal Harry is still talking to Earthlink, and may be contacting the various megasites that linked to his file, but in the mean time we thought it would be a good idea to put a spotlight on the matter. A few people have also discussed setting up a contributory fund at some point to help out. However, we'd better shave those figures down to something reasonable at the very least.
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