Stealing My Bandwidth

The Internet is loaded with clever and/or pretty eye candy. This consists of joke files usually in the form of jpg or animated gif files or photos which are in various file types like jpg, png, etc.

A lot of owners of personal web sites like to use these files to liven up their pages or to convey a theme. Some of them make their own image files or use files created by talented folks. There are a number of these files that the creators have given open permission to copy (save) and use on personal web sites. Notice the word 'copy'. If a website owner 'copies' the file and pastes it to their own site, this will cause a 'hit' on the original owner's site every time the image is accessed on the 'copied' site. This is known as 'hotlinking' files. Most of the sites that provide these free files have a notice that users should save the files to their computers and not use the 'hotlinking' procedure.

Hotlinking can cause the original owner big bucks if their images are used on a lot of sites using the 'copy and paste' method of adding images. Every time a 'hit' on the copied image a bit of bandwidth is used on the original owner's site. If the image is fairly large, like a photo being used for a background, this can cause quite a lot of bandwidth for the original owner to foot the bill. Even if the image is small, if enough 'hits' (times accessed) are made, it can cause the bandwidth bill to get big!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people using free services for personal pages that really do not have a clue about real websites, hotlinking or bandwidth theft.Two of the biggest free service for pages described as online diaries and journals, rofiles, blogs, etc., are Xanga.com and MySpace.com.

Once the users for these pages discovered images on my website, the hits on my bandwidth went ballistic! Over 5000 hits for the month of December alone! This has caused me to work overtime trying to stop or disuade these users. Educating them would probably work best, for which I have enlisted the help of a friend who joined MySpace for just that purpose! (Thanks, Enon!)

Some of the users are trying to do the right thing, but a request from one just brought an email with obsenities!

I hope they will comply with my request to remove the hotlink from their pages, if not, I will publish the offenders' names and page addresses here on January 6.

Some terms in this article explained:

Bandwidth

Hotlinking

Until later,

Martha

Martha's Web