21.02.2005 | 16:16

About hotlinking

I looked at Ulla's statistics today. Guess what: about 25% all hits in February so far (a hit = when a page or a picture is loaded) are caused by hotlinking.

There's one blogger who has linked the first Nurja puoli cartoon and her blog has caused 2,1% of the hits. 2,1%!!! That's pretty much considering that the most hits comes from a link on my web site and that's 5,1% of it all, both pages and pictures counted.

The rest of the hits come from the hotlinks to the the second cartoon made mostly by several LiveJournal users.

OK, I understand that the cartoon is funny and worth linking. Why not just add a link, why take the picture without asking for permission? Some might even call that stealing or bandwidth theft.

We pay for the bandwidth. We can use a limited amount of it every month. Ulla hasn't gone offline yet due to exceeding the limit and we'd like things to remain that way. We'd like Ulla to be available for the readers in the future as well. 25% of hits caused by other sites that are only loading our images is way too much!

So, hopefully the tech support from the web hosting service responds to either of my messages and tells us how we can prevent hotlinking. (I've done that on our site but the solution doesn't work with Ulla.) I've been waiting for a reply for a week now...

I know, this entry most likely does not cause a mass enlightenment and make people remove the hotlinks. However, next time you're thinking of linking to someone else's picture, think twice and don't do that, don't steal others' bandwidth. (Note from the editor: copying pictures without permission is not allowed either.)

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