Bandwidth Borrowing--well, Theft!

A couple of years ago an internet friend of mine had a really excellent site for an actor named David Selby. If you were ever a fan of Dark Shadows or Falcon Crest you know who he is. One day, her website disappeared and it turned out she had to take it down because she had too many bandwidth overages. Why did that happen? One way is from too much traffic but another culprit is when someone comes onto the website, gets the URL of the pictures or graphics there and then uses them on their own site for their own personal use...for free. Now, the right way to do it would be to right click on the image, download it to your hard drive and then upload it to a photo host somewhere. There are plenty of free ones out there. Either the borrowers don't know this or don't care. Anyway, that website went kaput.

The same thing seems to have struck our website and blogs. TB had engineers from the host do analysis to find out why we were suffering so many overage charges. One found URLS related to MySpace linking to our website. Another engineer implemented settings so that images and gifs from our site can't be copied to another. I'm just sitting here wondering who in heck would want to anyway? We have a family website and the images are not that exciting to anyone who doesn't know us--and even then!

But I also wondered...if our website is already down, how could anyone be linking to the images anyway? TB doesn't know. We're going to see what happens now.

As for me, I think I will keep my blogs right here. We are not going to get reimbursed for the more than $400 we're out for these overages and I don't want to take any changes!