The short answer is: we already do for the extent possible, so
we cannot filter any tighter.
We occasionally get this question from Free users who have received a
notification of traffic consumption substantially higher than
they normally have.
They assume this traffic is spurious (e.g. spam or network scan) and
that BuddyNS should take care of purging it.
Before you do jump to that conclusion, check
reasons for unexpected traffic. In
approximately half the cases, the excess traffic is actually legitimate, such as from
new services or some misconfigured service.
If you do establish that your traffic is generated by malicious third
parties, then such attacks typically subside after to few days, and
are unlikely to repeat soon. It’s simply anti-economical for them to
obsess on one organization.
Because of that, your best option is to wait a few days for this
traffic to subside. If the traffic rate has not subsided after
2-5 days, that’s strong indication that your traffic is organic, and
there to stay.
Even if you have received traffic abuse notifications from BuddyNS, don't
worry: we are friendly and we won’t mark you as abuser for excess traffic
one month alone. We only do upon repeated breaches, and you'll receive
additional warnings before that happens.
If you feel like we should “tighten our firewalls” to ensure that only the
traffic you deem legitimate is accounted for, please consider a couple
of fallacies of such demand. First, we already employ such filters,
to the broadest extent that does not interfere with legitimate traffic.
Second, this is traffic which our infrastructure does receive and
incur, purely on account of hosting your zones; accordingly, it
costs us every bit of bandwidth and resources which any traffic would.
Third, our servers serve tens of thousands of other zones, each with
their own geographies and patterns: further tailoring our filters to your
scenario only risks hurting legitimate traffic by other users.
The current rules were matured over years accounting for the lateral
variability of users and longitudinal variability of those scans in time.
Fourth, you're fully in control for a trivial, immediate and final solution
to this excess traffic, by upgrading to a paid account, at the cost of spare
change — which in most western countries amounts to the value of literally
few minutes of labor; If you're unwilling to do so, is it fair to ask we spend
much longer time designing, testing, deploying and validating a tailored filter
for this scenario?
Finally, our engineers’ salaries are supported by paying users. We have no
reasonable justification to use those contributions to tailor solutions
for a specific Free user so she can continue run her account without paying.
Our free offering is a friendly side perk we offer the community. It does not
include support, and we're happy if you enjoy it as it is. If you doesn't
suit your needs, consider upgrading or moving to another free service which does.
BuddyNS will start a synchronization procedure shortly for all
zones configured in your account. If your account hosts many
zones, push the little SyncNOW! icon next to the
specific zone you want to update, so your update will go
through more quickly!