Saturday, February 26, 2005

Bandwidth stealers!

So, I've got two people stealing bandwidth from me currently. (This is far less than what happens to big websites with lots of visitors, but it's still annoying!) I discovered them by running a report on my server logs and then looking at the top referrers.

The first one is some dude on a forum. He direct-linked to this image I made back in 2002. I don't really care if he uses the picture, because I don't own the art by any means, but yeesh, dude, get your own server space!

The second one is a guy who, for some inexplicable reason, direct-linked to my little "XML" picture instead of saving it on his own server.

So, I've created an .htaccess file in my /journal/images directory that redirects people to this picture:

[Edit: I changed the .htaccess file to just not send out anything. That reduces the bandwidth on my end.]
It seems to load really, really slowly on the perpetrators' pages, and I'm not sure why. I hope doing this won't cause me further bandwidth problems.

There may actually be more than just these two doing the direct linking. They were the ones who showed up in the Top Referring URL list, but I've also got the following in the Top Referring Sites list:

http://teenforums.studentcenter.org
http://www.eurodltd.co.uk
http://boards.theforce.net
http://boards.ign.com
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org
http://ddkclanforums.proboards19.com
http://forum.gameitalia.net
I'm not a member of any of those forums, sooo...

There are also a few things in there that confuse me:

http://www.paulmusgrave.com
http://www.xopy.com
http://www.dvdtalk.com
http://www.netcraft.com
http://www.nutzu.com
Who are these people? Are they linking to my site? Are they stealing bandwidth?

Note that some or all of these could be outdated now...I ran a report for practically the full history of my website, from February 13, 2002 until yesterday.

In other news...

Most Active DateFriday, May 14, 2004
Number of Hits on Most Active Date6,619
Number of Visits on Most Active Date220
BandWidth on Most Active Date42.97 MB
Least Active DateTuesday, February 12, 2002
Number of Hits on Least Active Date1
Number of Visits on Least Active Date1
BandWidth on Least Active Date252 Bytes
I don't think I'm in any great danger of exceeding any bandwidth limits ^^;;

This graph is pretty cool, though, right?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm the second guy and I am really sorry for the trouble. The template design wasn't mine and I've had no time too look into all the little links. I shouldn't have trust [...]!

Heather Meadows said...

Hmm, I wonder who made a template using an image from my site!

But it's no problem; I figured someone might not be aware. I was going to contact you privately before I changed the image, but a cursory scan of your website didn't reveal an email address, and I didn't want to post a comment that had nothing to do with your site content.

Really, you should be able to trust a template to not hot-link images...if I may ask, where did you get it?

Anonymous said...

Hmm, TBH my visitors are 30~40 every day and nearly all of them know me personally. That's why i didn't add any contact address. The template is a default blogger template with some modifications that a friend of mine did. I'd have changed it if knew it is linked to your server. Anyway now that we have a happy ending, please feel free to delete these comments.