Limiting connections on a webserver

I have heard you can do this the main reason i want to do this is because people are downloading off my server with upto 8 connections so i guess they are using something like download accelerator. so something like 4 wouldnt be unreasonable would it?

someone mentioned you can limit this in the httpd.conf file but im not sure what to touch.

im a newbie at all this so please bare with me.

Thanks in advance mike

I assume you're using Apache from the mention of httpd.conf, in which case you're looking for this. I've never implemented it myself I'm afraid.

One thing to be cautious of is proxy servers -- everyone on the same ISP may look like they're coming from one IP address. One way to mitigate this is to put the downloads you want to limit on a port number other than 80 (8080 is common). That will fix it for users behind a transparent proxy, and only leave problems for users who have explicit proxies assigned. There's not much you can do about those unless you want to implement a cookie-based system of some sort yourself.