Nate Ritter

I used to be a stats-whore, checking them a few times a day. In the past few weeks I’ve trimmed that back to about once every couple days.

Tonight I noticed that over the past two days my traffic has doubled. So, I set off to find out why and where the visitors were coming from and where they were going to (typically I do this to see which articles could use an Adsense ad or two to make some money off that traffic).

What I found out was that a bunch of people from myspace and especially the forums at gamespot were using images from one of my old blogs. Since I took down that blog the other day, I still wanted visitors to find this new blog, so i just redirect them to this home page. Well, little did I know, a ton of people were (and still are) using images hosted on my old site. So, when I redirected all traffic to this site, it redirected all those requests for that image. Unfortunately (for them), I didn’t redirect everything exactly as it was before, so they don’t get to use the image that once lived.

It’s dead.

And to all you who were hotlinking my images… I’d be happy to have you as a client, but I’m not happy that you used up a bunch of my bandwidth up to this point. Get your own place to host your own images. Our plans start at $9.95/mo, and we’d be happy to host as many images as you can fit in your allotted space and bandwidth.

Lesson for hotlinkers: Pay for your own hosting accounts.
Lesson for me: Enable hotlinking protection on every account I own.