It all happened due to my slow Internet Speed. Good Ol' Google told me about this cool site to learn Internet Programming in VB. So I checked it out, and it turned out to be really good with those free tutorials. But it would take me years to learn what I wanted if I read the entire page, following the entire tutorial's steps and then waiting for my browser to download the next part of the tutorial ( Can't really expect more @ 3Kbps). So I used an offline downloader to download the entire web site. Well... that turned out to be an even slower process, so I increased the maximum number of connections to the server to 188. The trick worked and it was all being downloaded pretty smoothly, until the download stopped with a soceket error .I retried many a times but it stopped with the same error every time.

So the only option left was to continue the online tutorial. So I typed in "www.vbip.com" in my browser's address bar and clicked on the go button. While I waited for my DGL (Direct Galaxial Link ) to open the page, I went about googling. After about 5 minutes I checked the page and to my surprise it was all blank and my browser was indicating that the page had been downloaded completely. Then I resorted to refreshing the page, loading another page on the same domain,but to no avail.

So, I guess they banned my IP for using too many connections, wright? (Just guessing) Is there any process to un-ban myself or will it be done automatically?

Umm.. most likely as you said - your IP got banned for too fast downloading and/or eating up too much bandwidth.

Usually - such sites employ the BWShare ( http://www.topology.org/src/bwshare/README.html ) module for Apache, to block out IPs that are eating up too much bandwidth too quickly to prevent leeching.

In normal mode of operation, BWShare simply blocks your IP out for a given number of seconds. If more requests are done during this period, you're penalized even further and the block countdown timer shoots up by a certain number of pre-fixed seconds for every request made.

As far as I know - this blockage is not permanent and if you go back tomorrow it should be all fine. So try once again tomorrow and let us know.

If nothing works, I might be able to give you some public proxy addresses that'll help you bypass this blockage.

Regards,
m^e

Thanks m^e. I used a free proxy server to gain access and its working fine.

I no longer need the Proxy server. My IP seems to have got unbanned and I am pretty sure it took about 20 Hrs. I guess 188 connections were too much for the server .

Cool. Issue resolved. Topic closed