hotlinking
Published Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Over at the Inside Windows Marketplace blog someone (I believe a MS employee) has linked to my website. Normally this would be a good thing. The MSDN blogs get quite a bit of traffic and some of that traffic would bleed over to my page. Unfortunately they didn’t include a hyperlink to my site but included a graphic that resides on my site, this is called hotlinking. Now I’m not upset that they are “stealing” my image because (as you can see) it is simply a screenshot. But their site gets a lot of traffic. Every time they have a visitor their server is telling the the visitors browser to pull the image form my sever. I only noticed because I saw a spike in my traffic and checked my stats to see where the traffic was coming from. As of this writing serving images to their visitors accounts for 12% of my bandwidth. That is 12% of my costs are paying for them to have visitors. Doesn’t seem right does it? I’ve sent a fairly friendly note asking the blogger to remove the image. If they fail to comply I’m going to have to take drastic measures.
Because they are linking to an image on my sever I can do what I want with the image. I can delete it so their visitors will see a broken link. I can instruct my sever to block requests from their page (again their visitors will see a broken link). Or more dramatically I can replace the image with porn. Wouldn’t it be nice surprise for the MSDN blog readers to see a nice goatse image (note: this link is to a encyclopedia article discussing a very graphic image, the image is not in the article, safe for work) when visiting the Inside Windows Marketplace blog?
August 9th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
[...] hotlinking (update) Published Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 9:44 pm I warned them that hotlinking is rude but they didn’t listen. I gave him a week so drastic measures were needed (don’t worry, no porn). Let’s see if he gets the hint now. [...]
August 10th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Sorry about the hotlinking! Didn’t realize it would screw you up! We’ll change it and we’ll do an apology on the site that links to you in a real way. Look for an update later today. We’re in the process of shipping & took an unfortunate shortcut that screwed you up. Sorry again to be rude!
– Dee Dee Walsh, Microsoft Windows Marketplace
August 31st, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Personally I think you were lucky. You were hotlinked from MSDN which led to many people visiting your site, including myself. Being it was Microsoft, they responded and even apologized for the bandwidth stealing, linking to your site again giving you even more linkage.
I had this exact same problem happen to me. Some punk kid who visits lots of gaming forums hotlinked to one of my image on my server to his signature skewing up my statistics and wasting my bandwidth just like you. I sent a message to the forum admins to take down my image but they never responded. So in the end I did a urlrewrite of the image which finally led to the kid removing the image from his signature in one of the forums… 2 more forums to go. :-/
September 20th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
In the end I was lucky but at first the only traffic I was getting was people viewing the image on the Microsoft site. There were eating my traffic but not visiting my site. DD was very nice to link to my site in the end.