It has been brought to my attention that a server that maps to powweb.com is doing some unseemly bandwidth hogging. A friend (whose name will remain anonymous) clued me in to the following:

Recently a series of bots from Powweb.com have been targetting websites with the sole purpose of accessing files simply to increase the bandwidth used... to the extent of exceeding the limits of the hosting service package... 4 (sites) that have had a series of attacks one starting 2 months (ago) and the others over the past few days.... In November sites that usually use between 10-30gb a month jump to 30-40gb a day... So far we have identified these IPs as the current offending addresses:

deny from 67.138.240.6
deny from powweb.com
deny from 66.152.98.61
deny from 66.152.98.62
deny from 66.152.98.63
deny from 66.152.98.64

The culprit picks the largest image file it can find and then the script simply hammers it minute after minute, hour after hour.

There's some speculation as to what the goals or purpose of these requests are. Some guess that it could be part of a company effort to mine data, a rogue employee, an error, a multi user account with very wide distribution, or another, more henious idea. I've quoted an unnamed colleague below:

Powweb is a hosting company. Hammers the hell out of a site's bandwidth for a month or so. Website owner receives their bill with excessive bandwidth charges. Powweb calls website owner and says "Hey we offer 300gb of bandwidth for $7.77 a month!! How much did you say your current host charged you for your bandwidth?"

I know some companies play dirty but this is a new low.

I DO NOT have confirmation that this is what's happening, but if folks have more information about this company, their servers or can confirm or deny the tactics, that would be greatly appreciated. Obviously, it is of great importance to get to the bottom of this matter and see that nothing illegal is occurring.

NOTE: See this for more on libel laws, if you're concerned about the content of this post. Also note that while the described hammering of servers can be proven (through log files I've personally seen), the speculation on why this is occurring is simply that - speculation.

Another Note: The folks at Powweb appear to be taking this seriously. They have a discussion on their forums here, and an employee notes the following:

Those servers are client servers. So any reasonable person would deduce that a client is simply hotlinking or possibly worse (that can't be ruled out). If data were provided to our Abuse department, a full investigation could be made....

It's asinine to think a company like PowWeb that's been in business for 6+ years would resort to something like that. A move as such would ruin its reputation to the point where business would probably stop due to this highly competitive industry.

At this point, I've got to agree, somewhat. Powweb has a very positive reputation online from what I can see. I suspect there may deeper issues here, and I'll certainly update as I get information.