What to do with a domain that is listed on Bitorrent?

[Mr-AJ]

I recently bought a domain about games. Backlinks were solid but after putting it up I realized that there were accesses from Bitorrent and I reached my bandwidth limit very easily within one day. I have no idea what this is about, I guess someone hosted Torrents and they are still available through Bitorrent and caused lots of 404s. Now I'm unwilling to assign that domain to any account unless I know how to handle it. I could create a 301 but then I'll just forward this bad traffic to another domain.
Does anybody have an idea how to solve this? Does it make sense to create an IP block or something in htaccess?
Any advice is highly appreciated!

[DonDelane]

Hi Aj!

I didn't get it. How do you know that it is bittorrent traffic. I mean, do you see that they produce 404s with yournewdomain.com/files/xyz.torrent or where do you see it? Is it traffic from a torrent application or from a web browser?

[Mr-AJ]

Hi Don, to be honest, I'm not sure what type of traffic it is and I'm unaware how bitorrent works nowadays. I just see it in my log files and instead of Mozilla Firefox, IE etc. I can see Bitorrent as system the visitor is using. And it's like a few hundred visits/minute so it's eating up a few GB in bandwidth daily.

[DonDelane]

Wow, that's a number !! I would test with an affiliate minisite on a google server like blogspot - until they kick it.
On the other hand you can park it at least on the sedo nameservers.
But google closed their program adsense on domains, I read something.

What are you doing at the moment? Switched it off?

[Mr-AJ]

Right now it's unassigned without any 301 or something.
Isn't there a way to setup .htaccess that Bitorrent is blocked completely? I mean, you can block certain robots too, why not Bitorrent stuff?
I just can't find anything online but I can't imagine nobody needed this already.

[DonDelane]

I did this one day, when I gut some unwanted traffic from a specific country.
If you analyse where the traffic is comin from, you can block it.

Here you have some lists: www°countryipblocks°net/continents/
(sry cannot post links)

But I don't know if this would be also counted as traffic, when you
have 100s of ips visiting your domain. Because your server has to handle it anyway.

If this would be normal users with webbrowsers, it would be a huge money machine.
But with a bitorrent app, I don't know.... You may ask some traffic sellers.

I would do some tests with blogspot/affiliate or sedo nameservers. Then you are sure,
your server isn't affected.

[Michael Martinez]

You can always forward to example.com but I would only do this for traffic coming from undesirable sites.

Or you could forward the Torrent traffic to, say, the FBI Website.

[DonDelane]

You can always forward to example.com but I would only do this for traffic coming from undesirable sites.

Or you could forward the Torrent traffic to, say, the FBI Website.

Hehe,...

What a generous tip !

Just forward it without a comment / or agreement to some official site...
You forget the sarcasm tag.

It's another case with companies, which make money out of it, like sedo.

[Mr-AJ]

I don't think it's real web traffic and the user visits the site. I think the previous owner hosted a torrent file that is no longer available and when people want to access this torrent file (that is still located in the Bitorrent system) they try and get a 404.
I only see two options: Either creating a proper 301 for all subdirectories to homepage or another page to avoid 404. Downside is that I still have plenty of unwanted traffic. Or there's a command for .htaccess to block this sort of traffic. I know how to block IPs but this won't work in this case.

[DonDelane]

As I said you will still get 100s of visits per minute hammering your server.
It has to handle every access through .htaccess.

If you have the capacity, and want to keep the domain on your server
then you can do a redirect via php. If there is a referrer or a specific
user agent they all have in common then you can redirect it with a script.

.htaccess allows to redirect the user agent afaik.

Show some example stats of this traffic.