After reading Neil Turner’s post about myspace users stealing his bandwidth, I decided to look into how much bandwidth was being stolen from my various websites.

I discovered that the URL to the Christmas Lights video I’d posted on my planetquack site had been passed around to way more people than I had expected and the bandwidth it was using was increasing rapidly. I took that video offline immediately! I could’ve had my site shut down permanently if I hadn’t.

I also discovered that a few of the images stored on my gallery were being hotlinked by 1) a myspace user 2) a livejournal user 3) a forum user as their avatar.

They weren’t using that much bandwidth, but it was still theft. The Random Images stored on my gallery are there mainly for my own use, being linked to other sites, so I only use my own bandwidth and not someone else’s. I don’t appreciate people taking liberties by being lazy and not copying the files to their own server, so I’ve (re)moved the offending images and I wrote a script that checks the referrer of a 404 to see if it’s coming from an offending domain (myspace, livejournal, xanga) and replaces it with a nice “I STEAL BANDWIDTH” message.

While I was in the mood for checking bandwidth usage, I noticed that my brother’s website was also using a horrendous amount. Looking into the logs a little closer I noticed that there were many of his images being hotlinked.

My brother has hosted stencils of HIM logos and HIM related artwork for many months on his site, and has had them stolen in the past. Some have even been offered for sale on ebay – the images are free to download and use, there has never been any need to pay for them! My brother and a few others are the creators of the artwork and have of course been rather upset by these scam artists – nothing a quick “report this auction” to ebay doesn’t fix though. People have had their accounts banned for trying to sell the art illegally. Idiots.

To stop people being able to hotlink the stencils now, I’ve replaced every one with the same “I STEAL BANDWIDTH” image I’m using on my gallery, and then converted the original images to thumbnails to use on the main page instead of the full-size ones (my brother should’ve done this to start with), then I zipped up each stencil individually and linked those in. Now the bandwidth usage on his website should drop dramatically as there is no way to hotlink directly to one or more of the stencils.

I’d prefer it if I could edit the .htaccess file on the server as this is by far the simplest way to stop hotlinking, but as our web host doesn’t support this (at least not without paying extra) we’re unable to.

I’ll have to check back in a few days/weeks to see how much the usage has dropped by after implementing these small changes.