Thanks for the Tip Bruno!”
Who’s Stealing my Bandwidth?
There are several ways that you can stop the bandwidth thieves from stealing your bandwidth. If they have an email, I would contact them personally or go through Domaintools.com and do an IP lookup which will give you information on the person and who the site is registered to. You can always get in touch with the hosting company that hosts their site too. Bandwidth can be expensive and the last thing that you want is someone stealing it.
You Internet Service Provider (ISP for short) can limit how much bandwidth you can use at certain times during peak periods or charge you a flat fee every month for usage. If you go over your usage limit regularly, then they will suggest you upgrade to a bigger bandwith package.
Files that are uploaded or downloaded from servers uses bandwidth to push files along the network at various speeds. Every time you upload a file to your hosting server, surf the web or watching streaming video, you are using bandwidth.
Bandwidth is a group of fibers or wires connecting servers to a network. Depending on the quality of the wire it determines how much data can flow across the network where your website is hosted. When someone attempts to use more bandwidth than can be handled by the system, the traffic slows down.
You can upload almost any file (webpages, sound files, images, videos and other programs) to your website. This excludes, of course, pop ups, banners , pdf files, scripts and images which are supposed to be loaded from your hosting server.
Bandwidth thieves link to audio, images and other files directly to your server instead of putting them on their own server. There are many reasons as to why people do this but, the main reason is to maximize the bandwidth they steal as much as possible to show their links and images.
Bandwidth is something you should monitor careful because you never know when someome will borrow and image or link from you for their personal gain.
Bruno
Tags: links, web hosting, bandwidth, web pages, files, images, web server
There are 21 comments - add yours!
Z Nicholas
December 2, 2008
Ajith Edassery
December 2, 2008
The biggest problem these days is not the data transfer bandwidth that is unlimitted in most cases. The CPU bandwidth in shared hosting can piss you off sometime because they will keep showing this CPU exceeded messages to the visitors. I faced it a couple of times and figured out that certain bad queries by plugins were causing this problem.
The learning was, first look into the bad sql query and CPU exceeded logs, and digg out reasons…
Of course, the points you mentioned are valid (like referring your heavy site contents like audio, video, images.
Ajith Edasserys last blog post..Right Time to Start Your New Self-Hosted Professional Blog
Bruno Auger
December 2, 2008
Ajith
Not many think of what you have mentioned thats for sure. Even myself missed that point but I understand where you are comming from.
I have also had that on shared hosting to with CPU exceeded messages.
Live and learn.
Dennis Edell
December 3, 2008
For those that may not know, the term for what was said here is, “hot linking”, and no, it’s definitely not a nice thing to do, and can get you shut down as a repeat offender…if you have an honest host/ISP.
Ironically Bruno, just the other day I called my host in a total panic as my bandwidth shot up nearly 40% this month! 5-15% max other months.
Fortunately it was 2 days of Stumble traffic I didn’t know about…I guess I should check stats more.
Dennis Edells last blog post..Would You Like To Sponsor My *Best Blog Review* Contest?
Bruno Auger
December 3, 2008
Dennis
Ya I bet you panic a little bit after noticing that until you checked where the traffic was coming from. I never knew it was called hot linking and it’s not very niuce to do.
There are some that just don’t care and only to do it to benefit themselves. In the end they always get caught anyways.
ZK@Internet Marketing Blog
December 3, 2008
Thanks Bruno, I think I need to check my stats on bandwidth usages , thats an area not a lot of internet markers watch closely
ZK@Internet Marketing Blogs last blog post..November Blog Update
Bruno Auger
December 3, 2008
Zk
I always watch my stats carefully. Eventhough I don’t see too much people trying to steal off of me you never know when it could happen
Blogging from Scratch
December 4, 2008
I have huge problem with this. I made a guide and a lot of sites/forum are copying both the guide and the images
Blogging from Scratchs last blog post..Hello, world!
Erwin Tan
December 4, 2008
Thanks for the tip Bruno. Another add in my daily to-do list.
Erwin Tans last blog post..Unleashing The Niche Genius In You
Bruno Auger
December 4, 2008
Thats terrible to hear others are stealing you bandwidth. I’m sure you’ll find away to prevent them from using your stuff.
Bruno Auger
December 4, 2008
Erwin
No problem glad I can help.
Dennis Edell
December 4, 2008
Blogging – are they stealing your bandwidth by hot linking to your stuff, or are they outright swiping your content and placing it on their site?
Two different scenarios, with different courses of action you can take….somewhat.
Dennis Edells last blog post..UPDATED: Would You Like To Sponsor My *Best Blog Review* Contest?
Bruno Auger
December 4, 2008
Dennis
I didn’t say they were stealing from me. The post was to say that people do steal bandwidth without others knowing that they do and what they should do if some is stealing.
Dennis Edell
December 4, 2008
Sorry Bruno, I was replying to “blogging from scratch”.
Dennis Edells last blog post..UPDATED: Would You Like To Sponsor My *Best Blog Review* Contest?
Busby SEO Test Dewaji
December 4, 2008
That’s terrible to hear others are stealing our bandwidth, and thanks for this tips. BTW, Bruno did someone stealing your bandwith ?
Busby SEO Test Dewajis last blog post..Busby SEO Test
Bruno Auger
December 4, 2008
Busby
No one has stole my bandwidth yet but I have this post because it happens to other.
Simon - Site Flipping
December 4, 2008
I could like swear someone’s stealing my bandwidth.. it just goes – might just have to get onto something
Simon – Site Flippings last blog post..Some Enjoyable Posts In The Blogosphere 3-12-2008
Bruno Auger
December 4, 2008
Simon
It’s pretty easy to check if someone is stealling you bandwidth. Just check your traffic stats.
Ben Pei
December 8, 2008
Yeah that should be pretty obvious whether someone is stealing or not.
Ben Peis last blog post..How I Gained 14,000 Inbound Links Within Weeks
Louis Liem
January 6, 2009
I wrote an article about preventing bandwidth theft via images some time ago. Hopefully this article helps. It involves some coding you need to put on your .htaccess file.
http://www.homebiz.bukiki.com/save-bandwith-quota-prevent-unwanted-image-download/
Louis Liems last blog post..Avoid Twitter Phishing with Flagfox for Firefox
Bruno Auger
January 6, 2009
Louis
Thanks for pointing out that article on your blog. I will have to look at it.