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Getting slammed

Just a brief note. The site has been utterly slammed with links to the gallery this month, and the past 2 days have been particularly crazy with over 30 600 visitors gobbling up over 35 GB of bandwidth in just 48 hours and a total of 66 500 visitors and 76 GB over the last 18 days.

My server host has been upping the bandwidth with demand but it brought the server down this morning so he has pass-word protected the gallery rather than take the site offline completely. (Earthfirst rocks. Thanks Al. )

If the site has been really slow and buggy, now you know why. The gallery will return to normal function when the requests stop coming in or from February 1. Sorry for the inconvenience. And thanks for checking out my photography.

UPDATE: email just in from my server:
Na sweet it was just a spike - it is back up and so is the gallery. yay.

UPDATE 2: well, after all my reassuring folks that my site was protected against hotlinking, my host discovered that actually, it WAS hotlinking, and that there are a few sites using one of my images of Tobacco Bob *without asking* and *without hosting the image* on their own server. They are pretty big sites in Japan and Russia.... generating huge traffic. I can't believe they don't host their own pictures, and I can't believe they didn't ask!

But I showed em good. Their viewers are gonna cop an eyeful of pure goatse with a little message explaining that the site had hotlinked my images, causing my server to crash. I was so angry at them. Rude, rude, rude people. Let's see how long they keep hotlinking.... he he he.

But I am kinda sad that it was only hotlinking that caused the frenzy and not my fabulous gallery.

frangipani wrote this on January 19, 2006 1:32 PM
Comments
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I've closed comments on all older entries. If you would like to leave a comment for this post, please email me directly at martine {at} frangipani {dot} info and I'll add it manually. Thank you and sorry for any inconvience caused.
Werner said:

Hi Martine!
If the bandwidth is due to people linking to your photos directly you can use a .htaccess file to protect your bandwidth like so: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml
Cheers!

On January 19, 2006 2:43 PM,
frangipani [TypeKey Profile Page]said:

Thanks Werner, I did already disable hotlinking some time ago. It really sucks that people try that crap, isn't it. Such a pain in the arse.

On January 19, 2006 6:48 PM,
dr Dave said:

Martine:

Was gonna say the same thing as Werner... If despite your hotlinking protections, it appears some image files are getting pulled directly (should be easy to spot in the stats), let me know and I can help you touch up your htaccess rules to prevent that (I recently had to up mine to fight the increasingly annoying myspace teenage masses).

Anyway good luck and better too many visitors than not enough, right? :-)

On January 19, 2006 7:22 PM,
frangipani [TypeKey Profile Page]said:

Dr Dave, I think I need your help.

On January 20, 2006 7:35 PM,
Cbastian said:

didn't know the goatse. tried the link. man, you're not 'a cat to handle without gloves!' (as they say 'round here. don'nt know no translations 'though). Don't suppose thy'll try that again! (clever grrrl ;) like giving the pains in the ass a pain in the ass . . .

On January 24, 2006 6:01 AM,