Stop. Non Animated Version
It seems that my host is unhappy with my server usage so I’m trying to cut down on the amount of other sites using my images on their site. Unfortunately I don’t have time to contact them all, so this big blinking image will have to do.
If you are coming here because you see this image on your site, then what I’m asking is you look in your code, find any images that reference www.twistermc.com and host the image on your own site. I don’t care that you are using the image, I just care that you’re stealing my bandwidth by linking to it on my site.
Also, if you know of a good hosting company, let me know. I hope not to have to move, but if I do, suggestions are welcome.
I suggest MediaTemple, if you do have to move hosts.
I have been thinking of MediaTemplate. Good suggestion.
I’ve had pretty good luck with host monster. The thing I thought was nice was that the control panels let you set some limits on the bandwidth, so if end up maxed out for any reason, it will automatically put some limits on the bandwidth for whatever period of time needed until you won’t be hitting your limits anymore (which is kind of funny, since hostmonster advertises unlimited on most everything, like most hosting sites these days, but we all know “unlimited” doesn’t really mean unlimited.)
The control panel also has a few other nice features, most of which I haven’t had time to use, to tweak the site, and the price is good. Have had almost no downtime at all. Only 2 occasions. One was a minor blip – only down for maybe a few hours while they were upgrading a few servers. They weren’t supposed to be down at all, but that kind of thing sometimes happens – they misjudged the load the other servers would have to take. The other outage, as it turned out, wasn’t even their fault. When I called them, it was actually an East Coast outage due to naming server problems.
The other thing you might want to think about… embed your images. Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing enough web programming to know how to do all that either, but I know you can embed the images so that others cannot just link to them. It would require some work up front to find out how to do that and to switch the images over, but… it solves the problem. I’m sure that’s why most sites do that – less to protect against others using the images, and more to protect against other people just stealing the bandwidth.
Change your .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking. I do it my own site, it works fairly well. You can google “htaccess prevent hotlinking” to find out more, but here’s one link http://www.devpapers.com/article/242
Hotlinking stops them from stealing the image and using it on their site, it does not stop the requests that increase server usage. This is the biggest issue for me right now.
hey man.. check your email. Just sent you one about hosting. (from the email address you see above)