I have a lot of big downloads on my web site, so if somebody tries to download my whole site using automated software like HTTrack, it causes a heavy load on my server. Is there a way to block activity like this with the latest versions of Apache?
My main interest would be in throttling either the total bandwidth per IP address or better yet total requests per IP address. In other words I would like to have a rule like "if an IP address makes more than 20 requests per hour, or attempts to download more than 50 megabytes per 8 hour period, then ban that IP address for 3 days" or something like that. Is that possible?
