Data transfer theft.
Last month my data transfer hit a new record high. In fact, it was so high that I had to ask phusion for more data transfer at the last 10th days of the month lest the account gets suspended. So kind as he was, he upgraded my account and eliminated the risk of this site going down, at least for a while. That month, I had in excess of near 800 megabytes data transfer.
Then, the expansion of data transfer didn’t stop — some people were stealing my data transfer because they didn’t want to host the files on their own accounts elsewhere. Theives! They should know about the policies of hotlinking, and not to mention they were actually hotlinking my MPEG file, the hippo dance.
Initially when I decided to host the file permanently on my server, it was in hope that someday when someone wants to see the video, they will be able to through some Google searches. I believe they will find a link that actually works and allows them to view the video extremely useful, especially in times like this where most files go dead in like weeks. I have this belief ever since I found my (seemingly only one albeit a little discoloured) Pooh wallpaper through search engines.
Fine, a little more transfer won’t kill anyone. I thought that there’re that many people looking for the file and it’s what I intended such action for. But little to my knowledge that instead of being grateful (oh well) that I’ve put the file up to date for the mentioned benefits, there are people who actually link/load the video file directly from their sites, taking up (almost) all the allocated amount of data transfer that I have. Ingrate I say.
Barely 5 days into this month, data transfer accumulated to 430MB already, of which I believed accordingly to statistics, the hippo file is responsible for 85% and through estimation from the manual log file analysis, 90% of the hippo file downloads were linked from a few MSN Space users :
- http://spaces.msn.com/members/djfataly/
- http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaeljackson22/
- http://spaces.msn.com/members/PeterNewandreloaded/
Very interesting and thank you very much. If I had to pay for a local web hosting, I would have been paying tonnes extra just to support all you theives! Grow some brains and stop hotlinking without permissions (though I suspect I won’t agree even if you asked)!
Fine. That was the last straw and now I’ve renamed the file and still deciding what I want to do with the file at all. Right now I have 3 choices:
- Move the file to a new server — Move it onto some commercial free hosting server with data transfer restriction. This way at least they will get their file after the restriction goes off, better than clicking to end up with a 404 error.
-
Mail me if you want it — Or put it here with a different file name, updating the blog entry to say that if there’s anyone who really wants it, drop me an e-mail and I’ll reply with a link to the file instead of publically posting the link.
I don’t think there will be many people who will actually mail me, so I can actually keep renaming the file after the user has downloaded, or give them like 3 days to download before I rename the file again. This way those who really wants the file WILL get the file, as I had intended intially, and those data raiders can buzz off.
- Who cares? — Remove the file totally since everyone is probably gonna leech the file and not even remember who hosted it. I guess this is the last resort if I get too tired of this entire thing of trying to be nice and all.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave the potential downloaders to curse and swear at a 404 error if they try to download the file on this site.
Update: Wow, in order to keep bandwidth alive for the rest of the month, I’ve also made WordPress show 5 latest entries only!
Update #2: Cool, data transfer usage dropped drastically these 2-3 days. Definitely those 3 culprits I’ve listed. I’ll work on a solution soon once I’m free, k thanks bye!