My bandwidth usage has spiked over the past couple of weeks. Has my little corner of the web suddenly gotten really popular?
…
I can dream, can’t it? 🙂
What’s going on is that some sites have started to hotlink my images. To hotlink an image is to use an <IMG> tag to make an image on another site appear on your site, while actually loading the image from the other site. It’s bad for two reasons:
- It doesn’t give the original site/author credit for the image.
- The original site/author actually has to pay for the bandwidth used by the image every time someone looks at the hotlinking site.
So, who’s stealing?
Here’s a small time thief at LiveJournal. Not such a big deal, since this thief’s page doesn’t get very many hits.
Here’s a much more annoying thief: Free Republic.*** They’re more annoying because they suck up much more bandwidth than the small-timer from LiveJournal, and because all of this bandwidth is sucked from my site in the name of right-wing back-slapping over Sean Hannity’s radio show.
The biggest offenders by far, though, are myspace.com and offtopic.com. If you’re visiting from those places, please enjoy this site … but stop hotlinking my images! If you want to show someone else something from my site, then just link to the page where the image is, ‘kay? Thanks.
Because of all the hotlinking, I’ve had to modify the site a bit. A link directly to one of my images will show this:
(If all the images on this site look like that, then there might be a problem with your web browser’s security settings. Let me know if you’re having trouble with the images on the site and I’ll try to help.)
***Just think of what sort of image I could have put up on that Free Republic thread! 🙂