by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James
Every now and then, my Google News Alert for my website exposes something fishy in the online world. This time, Google sent me a News Alert for a website that offered free blogging software to users was providing code to a blog that allowed her to use my desktop wallpaper as her background. You can see a picture of it on my Spammy Scammers blog, where I've exposed them. Now, as you all may know, I do offer pretty, feminine free desktop wallpaper. So, as with any file, purchased or not (like an e-book), it is subject to being thrown online somewhere without the owner knowing.
I was flattered that this girl, who had a "private" blog for special chats (ahem...for boys only), wanted to use my pretty desktop wallpaper. What I was not pleased with was the fact that this blogging company had provided her with the code to pull my wallpaper from my site - meaning that the file she was using to display my wallpaper was being pulled from my website using my bandwidth. This is called "hotlinking" or leeching. It's when you steal an image and the bandwidth from one website and to display it on your website.
Bandwidth is basically the invisible stuff you pay for that shoots from your server at your hosting company through fiber optic cables and into people's computers to allow them to view your site. That's not the exact definition, but basically what it does. You know how when Daily Candy features a website, and sometimes you can't get to it? Well, it's because it crashed because it exceeded its bandwidth. There were too many people trying to access it at once, trying to pull images and text from it just by viewing them. You can prevent this by contacting your hosting company to ask them to increase your bandwidth (and your monthly charge). Or, if you know you're going to be on Daily Candy, increase your bandwidth for that month. But if you're doing well, then you'll have to keep that bandwidth increased for good...hopefully! A hosting company that has a technical system in place to provide more bandwidth on demand (like an overdraft safety account with your bank) is MediaTemple.
So. How can you prevent Bandwidth Theft, as I call it? You can get hotlink protection, and block every domain from displaying images from your site, except domains you specify. And this does not prevent people from "grabbing" images off your site, uploading them onto their servers, and displaying them. Which isn't always a bad thing for PR reasons. For example: if you have a blog, and you want to display images that are housed on your website's server, you would allow your domain in your hotlink protection code. Social bookmarking sites like StyleHive kindly displays and shows off your images if someone socially bookmarks one of your product pages. BUT, if you have hotlink protection and did not allow for StyleHive to be an accepted domain, then your images won't show up there for people to drool over. Get it? So just make StyleHive an accepted domain in your code for your hotlink protection.
How will this affect random bloggers who periodically want to showcase your products or logo on their blogs? Well, unless they email you to alert you that they are about to feature you, then the image won't show. They can always grab the image from your website by right clicking and saving to their computer, and uploading it to their server. Or you could put a message in a convenient place that says: "Hey bloggers: if you want to show off my stuff, contact me and we'll arrange something."
I went the route of hotlink protection because I was getting monthly alerts from my server that I was exceeding bandwidth, but my traffic was remaining the same. Mysterious, right? I attributed it to the fact that I stored and served all of my images for my blog, FashionMista, on my Katie-James.com server. As FashionMista started to pick up, particularly one image in Google Images that was doing particularly well, I was basically stealing from myself. So I got real hosting for FashionMista and started putting images over there. But, I was still getting the alerts! And now I think I know why. Hotlinking.
Hotlink protection may not be for everyone. It is right for me, for the moment, because I offer free images off of my website that people grab all of the time. For example, I have not added the LWL blog to my list of accepted domains. So I can't post an image in this post from my site. I can post an image that I've got housed at FashionMista.com. See?
(this is the latest wallpaper from Katie James,
but I've got it on the FashionMista.com server so that it will show up here)
I'm posting this image here, but technically, I'm hotlinking from myself via FashionMista.com. Right click on the image and you'll see what I mean. But I gave myself permission, so it's ok. So, there are pluses and minuses to hotlinking. So before you go blocking everyone from posting your images using your bandwidth, make a list and think it through. It's easy to undo, though, if you jumped the gun.
If you need help with this, you can email me at Katie James Pixelated and we can set up some hotlink protection for you.
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