Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 March 2006 02:16:05
Is something I've never had to deal with before - I mean, other than making sure I don't steal other people's.
Bandwidth theft is usually achieved by placing an image on your website that is loaded from somewhere else. Each time the image is loaded it shows up on your site even though it's the originating site that has to pay for that bandwidth.
For instance, someone on msn is using one of the wallpapers on my website as the background for their mySpace page. So every time a viewer loads their mySpace page it loads the image from my website.
It's been loaded 260 times in the last week and a half, and that makes 43mb of download bandwidth "stolen". It singly accounts for 42% of my bandwidth usage over that time.
It's not a huge problem at the moment so I'm going to leave it for the time being, my image is branded (albeit right down the bottom) so at least I'm getting some advertising out of it. Not exactly my target demographic though. I was thinking of replacing the image with a giant sign that says "bandwidth theft is not cool" or something similar. Maybe I'd be better off with a big, bright ad. Either one would probably get him to stop using the image...
Btw it's something to consider when you're putting images on to your wiblog too.