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Note that some or all of these could be outdated now…I ran a report for practically the full history of my website, from February 13, 2002 until yesterday.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 Date Friday, May 14, 2004 Number of Hits on Most Active Date 6,619 Number of Visits on Most Active Date 220 BandWidth on Most Active Date 42.97 MB Least Active Date Tuesday, February 12, 2002 Number of Hits on Least Active Date 1 Number of Visits on Least Active Date 1 BandWidth on Least Active Date 252 Bytes
I don’t think I’m in any great danger of exceeding any bandwidth limits ^^;;
This graph is pretty cool, though, right?
