I’ve been put out of business for two weeks. A number of lowlifes with MySpace accounts and some random ignominious bloggers decided to steal my bandwidth by illegally hotlinking to my images. They sucked more than three-quarters of my bandwidth in two days, and yesterday I went to publish something to my website only to get a bandwidth exceeded warning. In the past I’ve used less than 3% of my monthly bandwidth allocation, so I never had reason to expect something like this.
I am angry. Half of my potential income for two weeks is simply gone, because a handful of miscreants wanted some nice images for their blogs. Guess what, though. I know who you are. I have half a mind to send you an invoice. I know how much my bandwidth costs me. I know how much of my bandwidth you’ve stolen. Not hard to work out what each of you owes me on that side. But a little harder to work out how much income you’ve cost me.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:19 pm
That would be really irritating.
I think I would at least threaten them with an invoice.
I haven’t thought much about bandwidth issues in a long time, I guess I just figured hosts had started doing the same thing the cell phone hosts had done, and upgraded the plans…
Good luck though
July 21st, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Can you explain a little more about what this means and how it can happen? I am on satellite Internet and every thing I do today effects how I get access tomorrow.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Aric Keith: Thanks so much for your comment. If I can get hold of contact details, I am definitely going to send those invoices.
Clouda: This is if you own your own website and pay to have it hosted. You pay for a package that allocates you a certain amount of bandwidth each month which is what your visitors use when they view your webpages. If someone with a blog hotlinks to the images that you host on your website, then your bandwidth gets used everytime their visitors view those images on their blog. If a lot of bloggers use your images, then it eats up the bandwidth and there is nothing left for your own visitors to use to view your website - meaning that I’ve paid in advance for the bandwidth only to have someone else get the benefit of using it.
July 21st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
I’ve had that happen to me, and it IS annoying… I changed the image to one that said something like “The person displaying this image is hot-linking and stealing bandwidth.” . . . then re-named my image. Later I deleted the other image so no more bandwidth would be stolen.
July 21st, 2008 at 6:50 pm
It is annoying. What Linda suggests is probably the most practical solution.
July 21st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Oh, I’ve done that in the past. Actually, I changed my images to be advertisements for my site and thought that was a fair substitute for the “payment” of bandwidth. But now it’s gone too far.
July 21st, 2008 at 10:45 pm
It happens to me all the time too, and currently myspace is also the culprit.
I used to have over 2,000 funny pictures on my website, and the bandwidth that was stolen was enormous - and that was before myspace. I used to rename the images and put a nasty one up in place of the old one, but that just got to be hard work.
I use only about 3% of my bandwidth too. It’s very frustrating. Problem is that if you don’t do something about it, next month you will have the same problem.
There are things you can do to help stop it, like preventing right clicking on your images, and there may be scripts to stop hotlinking. I hope you find something.
There are two ways to deal with it of course. Block it completely, or utilize the traffic. If there is a way to display an image on myspace that says to see the image they have to visit your site, then you might get some more traffic.
Good Luck
July 21st, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Are you familiar with the .htaccess file and do you know how to edit it?
It’s a file used by Apache, and one way to block hotlinking to images is to add code to it.
I don’t fully understand the code, but in a forum for my host (POWWEB) I found this snippet.
——————
I just tested this code again. It works fine to stop linking to .jpg and .gif images.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
Just be sure to write your correct domain there in place of mydomain.com. Wordwrap might cause this code to display on too many lines. There are only 4 lines in this code. Each one starts with the word Rewrite
——————
You might try Googling for other solutions too.
Good Luck
Tony
July 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 am
Ya know, when I first started out last year, I had no idea that linking through to an image location wasn’t the way to do things. I thought I was getting around issues with copyright, etc., because the image was still being hosted by the person who owned it. I had no clue about using someone else’s bandwidth and that I was doing a bad thing here. Finally figured it out and fixed the issue on all my lenses, but I _really_ didn’t understand that it was an issue. My guess is that kids on myspace (funny how that’s my assumption, right?) also have no clue, but unfortunately aren’t trying to learn about the internet and thus won’t discover the issue on their own. Not excusing them, but I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:07 am
Tony: Thanks so much - it’s so sweet of you to look that up for me. My cPanel has a feature for Hotlink Protection, which I have now turned on. It’s probably exactly what you indicated but with an interface to make things nice and easy. I am kicking myself for not using it sooner, but I have been using that site to host images for my Squidoo lenses and I didn’t want to accidentally shut myself out of legitimately hotlinking my own images. But, of course, as soon as I looked at it more closely, I realised that it has “safe” domains. As soon as my site is back up, I will test it thoroughly.
Susan: I did think of that. I know a lot of people (not necessarily kids) who have found blogging to be quite easy, but they know nothing about the Internet. It is easy to make an assumption if you are unaware of the technical aspects of what you are doing. But someone has to educate them, otherwise they start teaching each other the bad things to do: “How’d you get that picture on your blog?”
September 10th, 2008 at 4:00 am
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November 3rd, 2008 at 5:32 am
Hello my dear! I just stumbled upon your blog post about bandwidth theft. I too have several websites that I pay a pretty penny for — how did you discover they had stolen your bandwidth aside from being shut down? I’ve seen other website administrators display an image when hotlinking has happened with their website. Is there a way to run a report to see just where are the image linking is occuring?
November 3rd, 2008 at 8:11 am
Hi Julie, thanks for visiting
It depends on what sort of stats your website hosting package makes available to you. Mine used to offer a good stats program that showed exactly which image was drawing a lot of bandwidth - ie, excessively so for the amount of visitors my site was receiving (but they’ve switched stats programs now, and it no longer shows image stats grrrrr).
However, the next bit of information you need is the referral link statistic - ie, who is linking to your site, because hotlinking images is actually a backlink (and which was why I allowed it for a little while until it got out of hand. But I don’t know if the search engines treat that type of link as having any value.)
With the referral link, you then need to visit the website and look for your images, and that’s your culprit. I could also see in my stats how many hits each referrer had made, and together with the size of the image I could work out how much bandwidth that site had stolen from me.