I was skimming over my site stats for the first time in a few months because… well, because I was at 127% productivity for the week and I think that means I’m allowed to stop working. It also means I’m insta-bored and watching the clock slowly inch closer and closer to 2:30.
ANYWAY! My bandwidth which normally hoveres around 500-600MB a month suddenly jumped to 1.09GB last month and is pushing 970MB this month. ALL of this has been from hotlinkers. (Well, almost all of it. There are a few people out there who check out the site A LOT while thinking I don’t know but I do know and… *waves middle finger at them*)
I mean, there are about 40,000,000 free image hosters out there according to a simple google search. They host images FOR FREE. F.R.E.E. I do not. I pay for it. And it’s not like I pay any huge amount for it because I’m with the best hosting company in the world run by the best webmistress/web designer in the world and even though I’ve more than DOUBLED the amount of bandwidth I’m supposed to use in a month and she hasn’t said a word, it still bugs me.
To me it’s like tapping into your neighbors water supply. They don’t really feel the effect at first. You conserve. You take 5 minute showers and turn the water off when you brush your teeth and only flush if it’s solid… but after a few months of getting away with it you get greedy. The guilt starts to fade, assuming there was any in the first place, and suddenly you’re letting the kids play in the sprinklers for a few hours while filling up the swimming pool.
I don’t so much mind if somebody takes a silly blinking Santa image and uses it on one blog post to wish all her readers Merry Christmas. To me that’s reasonable. But when you take that image and post it in the comment form of ever single “friend” you have on MySpace, well… YOU SHOULDN’T DO THAT! Or on every forum you post on. Or on every other community blog site you post on. Because every one of those 1,600 “friends” has another 1,600 “friends” and pretty soon 14,367 (actual number of hits recieved so far this month for that one file) people are looking at my picture that’s being hosted on my site that I’m paying for. That’s 10% of my total traffic for the entire month. 115MB! From a .GIF!! And that’s only ONE of the images!
Seriously. I don’t want to have to disable hotlinking because I’d have to spend a stupid amount of time organizing the images I have spread out all over the web into one folder that’s allowable. But PLEASE PEOPLE! Fill your own damn pool with your own damn water. IT’s FREE! Because otherwise I’m about to start hopping from place to place and pissing in them.
kthxbye,
Antigone