Blocked OperaMini
June 25th, 2007 by GregThis is a sad day as I have had to block OperaMini from accessing my site.
Opera Mini is a service that lets normal cell phones use the Internet. See http://www.operamini.com/help/faq/#mini . In short, the Opera Mini servers fetch Internet content — including feeds — and displays it suitably for cell phones, all on behalf of the Opera Mini users.
I discovered a couple of weeks ago a large number of hits from the Opera Mini IP range and emailed them with reguards to the amount of hits to my site they where making, I am talking nearly 1000 hits an hour.
Opera’s response was :
The Opera Mini servers maintain xml feeds for its users and refresh these several times per day, depending on feed popularity. It is not normal that the downloads scale up to the thousands, however. We are currently investigating this issue to see if there is a problem with the service that makes it misbehave like you describe.
Well it’s 3 weeks since that reply and nothing has changed, Opera is still leaching more than 800 feeds an hour from my server, this is just outright abuse and it appears that they do nothing about it.
So today I have blocked their IP range 195.189.142.0 - 195.189.143.255 from accessing the web site, I would suggest that others consider doing the same as you could find the same happens to you.
Think about the cost in bandwidth, 800 feeds each nearly 9k in size, thats a total 7.2MB an hour, or 173MB bandwidth a day, thats 5GB a month.
I have notified Opera of the decission and await their response, I am sure it will be an interesting one. I don’t want to block OperaMini users from accessing the site but at the moment I can’t afford to using the method that is currently used by Opera.
We wait in anticipation
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