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I hate it when people steal my bandwidth

I originally posted an image a while back that apparently has been mentioned in the New York Times, among other places. But the problem is that when everybody searches for "1 Weekend a Month My Ass" on Google, they come up with the image on my site (and I'm sure I'm not the only place that has the image). And then they post the image on their site without copying the image to their server, causing me to have to pay for the bandwidth. Be smart, like this guy, and learn how to put images on your own server. So far about 100 referrals in the last 48 hours from Google for that search, so I'm sure I'll find more people using the image from my server once I look through my logs.

I'm glad that you've found my site, but please save my bandwidth. Thanks :-)

Update on 9/30/03: A full update on all of this, and what this picture has been doing online, and who has been linking to it is available in this recent post.

Posted by Jake on 07/22/03 @ 02:05 PM
Posted in Site Info | 10 Comments | Permalink
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Looking for something? from studio2f on 07/22/03 @ 02:33 PM:
My google keyword tracking script is going nuts. Seems all of a sudden hundreds of people are showing up here looking for the "One Weekend a Month" photo. If you can't find what you're looking for, it's here.Update: "One Weekend... (Read More)

Looking for something? from studio2f on 07/22/03 @ 03:16 PM:
My google keyword tracking script is going nuts. Seems all of a sudden hundreds of people are showing up here looking for the "One Weekend a Month" photo. If you can't find what you're looking for, it's here.Update: "One Weekend... (Read More)

10 Comments

hudson said on 07/22/03 @ 02:13 PM:

Hi. I'm "that guy" from above. People stealing bandwidth pisses me off to no end. I feel your pain. If it helps, I rigged my my images directory to redirect image hijackers:

http://www.studio2f.com/archives/000033.php

Hope this helps. great site. cheers!

hudson

Jake Ortman said on 07/22/03 @ 02:19 PM:
I'll certainly check that post out, as I've been looking for a good solution to stop these folks. I'd like to post more images, but stuff gets linked to far too often. I'm just been renaming the images whenever I notice a bunch of traffic to the image in my logs:

Original Image URL

Second Image URL.

It's now posted at:

1weekend-QUIT-STEALING-MY-BANDWIDTH-YOU-BASTARDS.jpg

;-)

hudson said on 07/22/03 @ 02:27 PM:
oh- and I received that image as an email- i had no idea where it had come from. I'll definitely attribute it to you...

lsd4all said on 07/22/03 @ 02:33 PM:
I am having similar bandwidth problems. I run a few website off my home DSL connection and one website has some obscure rock band pictures. I check my webserver logs weekly and noticed that early this year some wise guy chose one of my band images as his message board icon. Now I get 10k-20k hits a month just on that one image since EVERYTIME someone reads that message board my hosted image comes up. I could remove the image or shrink it's size (i think it's already under 10K) but I won't. I havent seen any noticable decline in my home web browsing so I dont deal with it. I figure this is just part of being a website sys admin.

Jake Ortman said on 07/22/03 @ 03:06 PM:
You certainly don't need to attribute me, as I got it via e-mail, too. It was from a reservist who sent it, but I'm sure they got it from somebody else, too. I'm not the sole source for the image, I'm sure, I'm just the only one that shows up on Google.

Neil T. said on 07/23/03 @ 01:40 AM:
Jake, you may find this article useful. You can use it to serve up a different image to people who steal your bandwidth. Where it tells you to add the stuff to httpd.conf, you can add it to .htaccess.

For more, do a Google search for 'mod_rewrite remote image' or something like that.

Ken Edwards said on 07/24/03 @ 05:40 PM:
Jake - with cPanel I can, and do, stop this type of bandwidth hijacking. I am sure you can do this w/o cPanel.

cPanel calls this Hotlink Protection. this is in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://breakingwindows.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.breakingwindows.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ http://www.breakingwindows.com/404.shtml [R,NC]

Ken Edwards said on 07/24/03 @ 05:48 PM:
heh, maybe i should read the comments first :-P oh well. heh.

Jon said on 03/31/05 @ 09:37 AM:
Umm don't want to bother you guys but I clicked on the http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=1+weekend+a+month+my+ass above

and then curiously thought I'd click on the images tab.. hey presto! There's Alladin!

Curious!

Jake said on 04/01/05 @ 07:17 PM:
Jon: Now that I'm on a meatier server, I don't have the need to block images as much -- only in certain circumstances, and usually for a limited time.

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