So basically saying if you run a free hosting provider your never gonna get a break! You need to keep a check on everything at all times. It may start as a hobby but becomes a job. I miss my Xbox....
Have you considered automating the monitoring of your service?
atbnet said:
I think the biggest stress factor is dealing with the abuse. Trying to do your best to prevent it and stop it when it does happen.
Same reply as above ...
Over the years, we actually ran several free hosting services as well as paid hosting services and the longest one ran over a decade and in all that time, instances of abuse were EXTREMELY rare and we didn't have any of the typical problems with piracy, hacking, TOS violations, or any of the usual garbage you usually find most places.
Our actual secret was artificial intelligence. Every account and every connection was monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and some pretty advanced systems profiled every action that every user took good or bad. You violated any rule and you were generally gone in 8 seconds or less and most found that once banned, you couldn't come back even with proxy servers (favorite futile attempt) which was the masterpiece of the entire system.
Many suspected that we must have had an army of thousands of administrators watching their every move but actually the servers themselves were capable of watching everything, could self repair, make administrative decisions, profile users, and take counter actions to any user activity. The true capabilities of the system went far beyond that and there are very few who know just exactly the limits of those capabilities.
Though nothing is official and the talks are still in the early stages and will still be debated for a while, I can say that our main company (not the free host project) is currently toying with the idea of possibly licensing our AI monitoring technology out to other hosts. If that goes forward as currently being discussed, it could radically turn the entire hosting world upside down and that is also something being considered as well.
I guess the big question is and the reason for pointing it out here, would you as hosts out there even be interested in having that kind of technology if it were openly available to you under license?