PREVENTING BANDWIDTH THEFT

© Gillian Buchanan May 2002

1. What Is Bandwidth
   
2. Free Web Hosts
   
3. Hotlinking
   
4. Bandwidth Theft
   
5. Copyright
   
6. Storage Space
   
7. How to prevent Hotlinking
   

WHAT IS BANDWIDTH

Bandwidth is the amount an Internet Service Provider (ISP) will allow people to download onto their computers in any given session. From a web designer's point of view it's a minefield - many free web hosts will only allow a small amount per month and if you go over the limit there are a number of things which may happen - your site could be shut down completely, the host might delete your account or they might freeze your site until the beginning of the next month when the whole merry go round will start up again. Or you could have a situation like Yahoo when if a lot of people click on a site at once it shuts down for a few hours and then reappears again with a variety of irritating error messages.

If you have a site that is two mb in size, and 10 people visit it and download the whole site onto their computers (you do this automatically when visiting any web site on the Internet) then your visitors have downloaded 20 mb of your allotted bandwidth. If your host allows only 20 mb per day (as some free web hosts do) then you have a problem!

Do bear in mind, however, that most home sites will be no more than one or two megabytes in size at the most but if you are going to do web design seriously you may well end up with several sites within your web space which very quickly mounts up to several hundred pages. The problem however only really becomes apparent if you are a member of a newsgroup whose members share your interests and every time you mention your site on the list several hundred people visit!

It is for this reason that you should in the first instance make sure all images and files are as small as possible before you load them into your server as a working web site. Avoid if you can using a lot of Zip files with screensavers etc in them for your visitors to download, as you will find this eats up bandwidth very quickly. Images should be no larger than 20-30 kb each and in most cases far smaller otherwise they are very slow to download and use up a lot of bandwidth. Use your image editor to optimise before uploading and make sure you always enter the height, width, border and alt attributes in the IMG tag. Your free web host will probably not offer statistics showing how much web space you have used or how much bandwidth you are using. You can check the total size of your site by opening My Documents, right click on the folder in which your site has been saved (DON'T DOUBLE CLICK AND OPEN THE FOLDER!), click on Properties. This will show the total overall size in terms of megabytes and the number of files in your site.

FREE WEB HOSTS

From the point of bandwidth it's important to look for hosts that allow a reasonable amount per month. The best I've found from this point of view are:-

• www.freewebsites.com

  This one allows 50 megs of space, unlimited bandwidth and you can use server side includes which I haven't found anywhere else on the Internet - that facility is usually a paid extra. You can customise the advertisements they insist go with the site so that visitors just get one ad per day asking them if they'd like an e-mail for various services.

• www.stormpages.com
  

  This one allows 50 megs of space, again not for storage but bandwidth is unlimited. Uploading is via a web based file manager and there are banner ads.

• www.bravenet.com
  

  Bravenet web space includes 100 megs, not for storage, web based file manager or ftp. You can choose between banners or pop ups but the bandwidth is only 600 megs per month or 20 megs per day. Bravenet have however dozens of other services which are useful to the web designer and you will probably want to use these.

• www.ukonline.co.uk
  

  There are no ads in this one but bandwidth is 50 megs per day although you can have unlimited web space "within reason". It's a free ISP and you do have to be connected to the Internet via their web server to use the space. No frills with this one and it's only accessible via ftp.

• www.netfirms.com
  

  This is the host I'm using for this site. You only get 25 megs of space here but there's 1 gb of bandwidth and you get free counters, access to a CGI bin and free counters, guest book and more! Banner ads of course but you can use this site as a business site and you can place your own ads on the site as well. You upload via FTP.

• www.brinkster.com
  

  This one gives you 15 megs of space and 16.5 megs bandwidth per day - but you can use PHP and ASP programming! The only one on the Web that I know of to do that. And there are no ads so if you plan on a page which won't have too many visitors this is worth trying, especially if you're learning Javascript or CSS and don't want Javascript based ads interefering with your script. Web based file manager.

• www.netsnapshot.com
  

  UPDATE 18th May 2002 Here is a storage site that lets you upload as many images and create as many albums as you want! Netsnapshot as of today no longer allows hotlinking to images as their server recently came close to crashing completely because so many people were hotlinking to images stored on the Netsnapshot server. You can still store images there though.

The above should give you an idea of the facilities that some free web space hosts offer. Remember that a homework site for learning web design won't break the bank with bandwidth (nor will most home sites - most home pages are less than 2 mb in total size) so you can try these and see how you like them rather than irritating your visitors by moving around the whole time. They all have a reasonable range of allowable file types too and declare them what's more.

HOTLINKING

What is hotlinking? Well, hotlinking occurs when you go to a web page and see a nice picture or a downloadable zip file and think "That would look good on my web page". Instead of e-mailing to ask for permission to use the file, downloading to your computer and uploading it to your web page giving the original author(s) full credit as you legally should do, you look at the source code to get the name of the directory where the file is located, and just link directly to the server (e.g. <img src="http://craftpages.topcities.com/mygif.gif" width="x" height="x" border="0" alt="My Gif"> - this image does not exist on the Topcities server by the way!

This has a number of possible consequences. If you have signed up to a free web host they nearly always say in their terms and conditions that if you place a file in their web space only for hotlinking, they will delete the account if the account is being used only for storage purposes. I only know of one that doesn't. And nearly all free web space providers (and some commercial ones as well) are setting up their servers so that if you do try to hotlink to items on them they will either not work (in the case of MP3s and so on) or will show up, either as a broken link or an image with a rude message on it. In a few cases a page you have hotlinked from may not show in your own web space at all until you remove the hotlinks.

If you have linked directly to another site's images (not your own) without giving full credit and asking permission to use the file, you could be at risk of legal action and will very likely be asked by the designer when, not if, he/she finds out to remove the image(s).

Unless you check back regularly the designer will probably be changing names of his/her files regularly which means that you will get broken images all the time on your site which does not look good. Even if you fix it regularly, if you and hundreds of other people link to a file on another site, the owner of the site to which you are hotlinking could end up with the site being taken off the Internet all the time because it's using up too much bandwidth. If the image stays but the designer changes its size and proportions, it might look very strange on your page suddenly. And what happens if the original site gets banned by its own server which has been known to happen, because so many people have hotlinked that the ISP bans the site permanently? Then you, a lot of other people and the designer may be unable to access the files at all, and the image is gone - permanently.

Another even more serious consequence is that facilities are now becoming more limited on the free web space providers and many people wishing to use their image work commercially are hosting on paid providers. Most paid hosts provide much more bandwidth and do not have the limitations the free ones do about hotlinking, but if you and hundreds of other people hotlink to an image on a commercial site you could force that site out of business by using so much bandwidth that they cannot afford to keep the site going.

How do you find out if your own files are being hotlinked to? Just go to Altavista and type in the name of the file you want to check (such as myimage.gif) - you can include the URL as well if you want to be sure it's yours the engine is searching for.

BANDWIDTH THEFT

Bandwidth theft occurs when you have placed a file such as an image or Zip file on your web site ready for your visitors to download into their computers. When someone decides to use it on their web site they do not download it onto their computer and then upload it to their own server within their file directory. Instead they link directly to it from their web page.

Why is this bad practice? Well, in the first case, it's stealing. Every time somebody downloads the other person's web page, they download your files as well. This puts a strain on the server containing your files and of course because the file is on your server it's using up your bandwidth. Furthermore because you are downloading a file which has been linked to directly from another server, it uses up more bandwidth than you would use up if you had placed the relevant file on your own server in your own file directory. And if the owner of the original site is paying for their web facilities, you could force them to take their site down if you use up so much of their bandwidth that they can't afford to keep it going.

This has been such a problem in the past that many of the free hosts have set up their servers in such a way that an image or file which has been hotlinked to won't show up on the page on the other server. Tripod and Angelfire are two such examples.

COPYRIGHT

Which all brings us to another very thorny subject. Some years ago on the Internet images were free for all and people could use them however they liked without worrying about consequences. Nowadays it's quite different.

You would be well advised to steer well clear of putting images of any well known film or book, such as The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or even the Charlie Brown gang and the Muppets on your web site because the companies that own the copyright of those images are known to be downright nasty when it comes to law suits. You do not want to find yourself landed with a large legal bill!

While most people won't have the resources for such action it still pays to be careful. Most free servers have an item in their terms and conditions that says they hold copyright for items put on their server (Yahoo! is one such example). Even if they don't, in nearly all of the free image sites there are strict notices up stating the terms and conditions in which you may use those images - and in most cases you can't use them for commercial sites. Why? Well, most free hosts tell you the web space cannot be used for commercial purposes in their terms and conditions, and if you take an image from such a site and use it in your commercial site, then at once you have placed the original owner in jeopardy of the terms and conditions of his/her host. Furthermore somebody offering images on their site for commercial usage is more than likely to be paying for the privilege and will lose a lot of business if you force their site "off air" becuase you are using their bandwidth by hotlinking to their server.

In nearly all cases nowadays images and services designed for you to use on your web site are link ware - that is, the designer requires you to place a link back to his/her site so that he/she may get some extra traffic on his/her site. It's only reasonable and polite too to acknowledge the amount of work and skill involved and if you really like the work of a particular designer then it's courteous to acknowledge when you use his/her artwork.

STORAGE SPACE

I'm sure you're beginning to see by now why it's not a good idea to use a free web space host with around 15 to 25 mb of space for your HTML files and then store images and zip files elsewhere in space such as Topcities. In the first case it's usually strictly against the Terms and Conditions to take any form of action of this sort. In the second case, most free web space hosts nowadays have set up their servers so that you don't see images to which you have hotlinked unless you're using their related photo album service or similar. Furthermore the free web space hosts offering photo album services do not now allow you to hotlink to these.

HOW TO PREVENT HOTLINKING

So how can you prevent hotlinking? Most free web space providers will already be doing this for you, but you can't stop it outright because anyone who really knows what they are doing can get at your HTML source code even if you have created a pop up window with no menu bars and disabled right clicking (you need to know Javascript to do this though), and even if your pages are within a frameset and fully referenced to one another with Javascript to prevent orphaning. Instructions for disabling right clicking can be found at www.javafile.com. Remember that lots of people forget to scroll on the Internet so if you want to protect your source code a simple trick is to put lots of carriage returns at the top of the document above the <html> entry,so that when people click on View Source and Notepad opens, it's apparently a blank screen. This won't put experienced surfers off for long but will deter some people.

If you really want to provide collections of images for downloading, it's better to make collections and provide them in downloadable Zip files - remembering that free web space hosts usually have distinct limitations on the size of files you may upload to their space, and your own ISP may have its own terms and conditions in this area. Many free hosts allow 256 kb or less although Yahoo! Geocities allows a massive 5 mb - the reason for this is to prevent people using the web space to store MP3s and similar large files. And people are slightly less likely to hotlink to a Zip file than to an image file. They would want to see what was in the file first, and by the time they've taken the trouble to download the file and opened it, it takes as long to upload the image to their own space and link it in to their web site. By the way, don't bother with Winzip - if you have Windows 98 or better just open My Documents, click on File - New - Compressed Folder and drag or cut and paste any files you want to zip into the folder. The file will look like an ordinary folder with a zipper down the middle but if you have Winzip the Compressed Folder option will show up as a Winzip file option.

You can make an image map (Paint Shop Pro has a nifty facility for creating one) showing the different images you have in your collection, people won't be able to link to those images only to the big one. It's possible to make the smaller images within the image map "clickable" and people can download the relevant zip file.

Do let me know if you have any further ideas in this area, by e-mailing me by clicking on the highlighted text.