One of the good things about moving from 1and1 is that I now have access to an excellent web stats package(s). 1and1 stats were garbage (in fact, we had to install our own), but the new host (asmallorange) are not so. Perhaps the first thing I noticed is that my old image gallery sure was getting a lot of hits — 600 a day. Wow, my pictures sure must be awesome! Who is linking to me and what accolades do they bestow upon them?
Upon reviewing the logs, I notice a trend. Most of the hits to the website look like so:
/albums/underwater/uw2.jpg
Http Code: 200 Date: Jan 09 12:23:58 Http Version: HTTP/1.1 Size in Bytes: 3491
Referer: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?
fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=XXXXXXX
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; YPC 3.2.0; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)
Strange eh? So what to do…
No pageviews, no browsing around. These people just take the image(s) and run. Wikipedia says that hotlinking
is the placing of a linked object, often an image, from one site in a page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the one where the object is located. It is used for such activities as linking images from personal home page storage into the online diary of the person controlling the personal home page.This has sometimes been controversial because it is possible that the site where the object is stored and from which it is retrieved will not like the new placement or will consider it to be bandwidth theft. This term refers to the unauthorized use of someone else’s bandwidth. Inline linking to an image stored on another site increases the bandwidth use of that site, even though their site is not being viewed in its intended form. Since bandwidth is a commodity, unauthorized use can increase the maintenance costs of the website hosting the image, hence the term bandwidth theft.
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