The Hickensian
51 comments
Invasion of the Bandwidth Suckers
To say that I’m fuming right now would really be an understatement.
Its bad enough having a live but unfinished site, and not getting time to work on it, but this took the biscuit, the teacup, and whole sweet trolley.
Earlier today, I had an email warning that I was currently 7gb over my 25gb a month bandwidth limit. WTF*?! In a panic, I added a new .htaccess file to redirect all pages to a basic holding page to try and slow it down a bit (please note: this was me, not SegPub. I didn’t get ‘cut off’). I later removed this after I’d calmed down a bit, but the fact remained, something fishy was going on.
Jeremy at Segpub tracked down the cause to a single IP address requesting the landscape image on the right, every second for the last 2 days! Thats over 700,000 times!
*Please note, thats the closest I’ve ever come to swearing on my blog.
Update: The admin of the network concerned contacted me to (sort of) explain what had happened – “I’m told he had found your page in a google search about BBedit, and had left a browser open at that page. I have no idea why the browser continued to download your image. I am convinced that it was an unfortunate accident,
though, and not done to cause you any harm.”. It also appears to be have been over 16 hours, rather than 2 days, and that it was someone who went home, leaving the page reloading.
This still leaves the issue of the reloading page. I’d seen this happening in IE only at the weekend. If anyone else can confirm that this is still happening, I’d be grateful. The image will probably reload on resize though.
Recent Posts
29.06.09 Icons for Interaction
16.06.09 Unite
10.06.09 Discovery
5.06.09 Daniel's Daily Monster
6.05.09 The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
Or Full Archives
playlist | RSS
Elsewhere
Download our vCard
RSS Feed
Comments | RSS
d said 1718 days ago:
it must suck to be that popular ;)ak said 1718 days ago:
i don’t get why people do these things. how does this benefit them? can they brag that they stole your bandwidth or something, and is that cool?just seems so stupid to me.
Rad Smith said 1718 days ago:
Maybe this ALA article will help?Jon Hicks said 1718 days ago:
I’d already set up a .htaccess file to stop hotlinking, but I guess the requests were too constant? Not sure.John Oxton said 1718 days ago:
Phew! glad you are back was starting to go cold turkey there for a minute!Peter Costello said 1718 days ago:
Funny,I this is happening to me. As my site is unfinnished, no one really knows its there and theres not enough content to warrant large downloads, yet 1 ip address is continually downloading the home page. I dont get it. WHY?
Will read the ALA article.
Thanks
Pete
Peter Costello said 1718 days ago:
OhhhBrady J. Frey said 1718 days ago:
I wondered why the image was down—what a dick. I wouldn’t think someone would be trying to bomb your bandwidth… most likely someone who didn’t know what their doing, or wanted it for their own.Adrian Kostrubiak said 1718 days ago:
700,000 times? That’s just ridiculous. I couldn’t ever see why someone would want to download that image so many times, unless that person was just trying to suck your b/w down the drain. But then, thats just mean. And unnecessary, too.derek said 1718 days ago:
as someone has already stated.. you are one popular designer.. haha. good thing you found out what was sucking all the bandwidth.Geoff said 1717 days ago:
It was a Lynx-Guerilla. They request images for websites countless times to suck up bandwidth. Eventually, they hope to lead to all web sites being text only. But you must fight. Long live pretty graphics!Michael Simmons said 1717 days ago:
I didn’t do it. :)I’m sorry they took your bandwidth. I hope you get them back real good.
patrick h. lauke said 1717 days ago:
sounds almost like an aggregator gone bonkers…very low tech approach, but you could completely block the requests for images from the specific IP via .htaccessNigel said 1717 days ago:
That’s not too good. A solution, perhaps, would be to make all the images on the site REALLY ugly. Hey, it’s a start. ;)Jez said 1717 days ago:
I managed to speak to the Network Op at the source in question and it’s all sorted. It didn’t appear to be anything malicious, or so they said.Anthony said 1717 days ago:
I used the tecnique at the ALA and get 500 Server Errors. Can someone show how I block traffic from a specific IP address as we have poeple trying to use our cgi scripts for spam all the time… (email singwolf@hotmail.com) – thanks!Rod said 1717 days ago:
This happened to me about a month back. There was this single IP address requesting the same image over and over again for a couple of days. I was lucky enough to catch it and ban that IP address before it ate up to much bandwidth. I don’t understand what would make someone do something like besides them being and big terd.Jeremy Flint said 1717 days ago:
So was it someone trying to use the image on their site? Must have been a pretty popular site to have grabbed is 700,000 times considering the image has only been up for about a week.I have had images of mine posted on messageboards before, and that can suck bandwith pretty quickly, especially if it is a popular board.
Rick said 1717 days ago:
Why would someone do that?Etienne said 1717 days ago:
Why not using this :RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/.*$
RewriteRule ^.* Ð [F,L]
Found on Funkaoshi Prod
Axel said 1717 days ago:
Why should someone do that? I guess that the whole shit happened not on purpose. My guess is it has to do with IE!OH NO… I’m blaming Microsoft! Yes and No. Yes, because IE behaves strange! ...and No because it is your code John, causing the problem.
I don’t know what is wrong with it; I’ve got not the slightest clue. But the case is, resizing the page in IE, reloads the images again (not so in Firefox).
Two days ago, (I guess), when I first looked at the new design, and tried out its liquidity in IE, the page did not stop reloading.
It loaded every image again… again… and again …and came never to a stop. Because of that, I closed the browser window! I bet somebody not!!!
The problem with the ongoing reload, is fixed now (how have you done it John, and what caused it?), but still when resizing the page, the images reload for every resize.
Jon said 1717 days ago:
Alex you beat me to it.I too am using IE and every time I resize the page it reloads all the images.
Also for every character i have just typed into this textbox it has also reloaded all the images!
Bizarre to say the least.
Aleksandar said 1717 days ago:
Jon, I see that you are using Apache. I never used it, but the behavior you have here in IE (constant download of all background images) is replicable on IIS, when you set Content Expliration in it.IE will then re-request each image on any CSS or script that changes the page display. This includes :hover changes, font-weight or background-position change, showing and hiding elements etc.
It’s the same problem that causes flickering when using pixy’s fast rollovers. IE does not cache the images (and even its own .htc files if you use them) and is constantly downloading them again, for each change.
So I guess that you should look for solution somwhere in the server setting. Mind you – not a single browser has any problems with this setting – only IE. I always find it funny that MS’s own products don’t work well together.
Stuart Mayanard-Keene said 1717 days ago:
Hi John,I too have noticed it when typing in the textarea, the textarea gets larger when you focus on it and doesn’t stop refreshing the image!!. I can send you a quicktime screenshot if you want?
IE Win 2000
Jon Hicks said 1717 days ago:
Thanks Stuart – I’m seeing that here too on Win XP/IE6. Eek!!Jon Hicks said 1717 days ago:
Aleksandar – I’m not IIS, but I think I’ve found the culprit. Thanks for the information though, that was very helpful!Jeremy Weathers said 1717 days ago:
Jon, please let us know what the culprit was. Inquiring minds want to know!Chris said 1717 days ago:
The whole issue of bandwidth sucking is becoming worse. I don’t know if that’s really what happened to you, but I thought I’d pass along a funny story about a friend of mine…A friend has a website for selling his instrumental samples and demos, and two other sites directly linked to one of his piano demos to create background music for their sites. When he discovered this, he re-recorded a sample of death metal music with a voice-over saying that the site was stealing bandwidth from his site and threatened legal action if nothing was done immediately. On one of the sites, someone posted a message to the owner saying “I think you should take the music down…it’s illegal, or something.” Needless to say, the links were quickly removed. In the end, it was pretty funny.
Chris said 1717 days ago:
I did experience the reloading problem in Firefox 1.0PR/Win – but it’s gone now. It would load the page as normal, then reload once, then it be fine.Curiously, it didn’t happen in Firefox 0.93/Linux…
Thankfully (for the sake of your bandwidth bill), it’s not happening anymore!
cedmond said 1717 days ago:
One thing that came to my mind while reading this is the possibilty of someone useing your image in a tool like GeekTool. GeekTool will let you provide a URL of an image to place on your desktop and then set the refresh rate to anything you like (even 1 second). This is great for local files, like graphs provided by stats packages on your webserver, but I can see how this could seriously mess with someone’s bandwidth limit.Gordon Mackay said 1717 days ago:
Hi Jon,I am still getting image reloads each time I: a) Hover on a link. b) type into this textarea.
Weird :(
Gordon Mackay said 1717 days ago:
... with IE6.Sorry, I forgot to mention the browser.
Jorge Luna said 1717 days ago:
Hello Jon, im using Firefox 1.0PR, the textarea for this comment is like 20px width and scrolls horizontally and vertically in a very VERY wierd way, i can only read the things im writting on the “preview” section.. is this one of those ‘its not a bug, its a feature” thing?C ya!
-jl
Aidan Dunbar said 1717 days ago:
yeah ive got the 20px box as well ffox 1.0Jon Hicks said 1717 days ago:
Sorry, folks, busy fiddling and bug fixing – all fine now!Jorge Luna said 1717 days ago:
Mmmm not to spoil the party Jon, but the “forget” checkbox as well as the submit button are breaking the layout, they apear next to the textarea insted of below.Also, when the page loads im seeing a blue background, is this intentional?
Im in FF 1.0PR
-jl online tester :P
Jon Hicks said 1717 days ago:
Jorge – please refresh. Also, no page loading effect is intentional. More ‘unfortunate’...Tom said 1716 days ago:
Wait a sec…when you refresh a page doesn’t it load the images from cache? Why would it redownload the image everytime? Unless this brain surgeon turned off the caching feature which really makes no sense since it speeds up web browsing.NAPPA said 1716 days ago:
Very early, in the first server I was running a popular community site. I made a mistake in the .htaccess redirect I had set up. It was a pretty simple mistake :Page a is requested.
User is sent to page b.
Page isn’t found, so user is sent back to page a
A loop is created.
This cost me about 30GB of bandwidth in day . This isn’t a problem these days though – the mod_rewrite ( if you’re using Apache to redirect or .htaccess ), the limit of this kind of loop is 10. Installing mod_throttle ( ask Segpub) , or one of the other bandwidth limiting modules will let you specify what you want to allow an IP to download interms of data per day, the speed, and more.
Out of curiousity – did they charge you huge ammounts ?
NAPPA said 1716 days ago:
Re: Comment #38 There is a feature in Opera to make a page load every __ second. I’ve used it before. Especially if you turn off caching .Sam Newman said 1716 days ago:
You know what? the image reload imight be getting caused by your live preview – perhaps by adding content to the dom it causes IE to refresh everything? I’d like to know – I use your preview idea on my site, and so will carry out some tests tonight…luckily, I don’t get that many comments :-)Jon Hicks said 1716 days ago:
Sam – it should be fixed now. I was using a javascript to change the stylesheet depending on how wide the browser window was (from The Man in Blue’s ‘resolution dependent layout’ idea). Once I removed this, the reloading seemed to stop in IE.Please (anyone) let me know if you still see any instances of the reloading!
soopa said 1716 days ago:
The suggestion of preventing hot-linking is all well and good. But it would not have solved this problem.Luke Shingles said 1715 days ago:
I think we all know the solution here, stop sending CSS to IE! I find using <?xml-stylesheet ?> is the best way. All the modern browsers understand it but IE is clueless.Dante Evans said 1715 days ago:
I stopped this problem before it could ever start: before I uploaded my site I was sure to drop a wee .htacess file in my images directory.Jon Hicks said 1715 days ago:
Dante – So did I! It wasn’t hotlinking though!the mechanic said 1714 days ago:
I initially found something wierd on a closing divhad to do some work and meant to send it then…
Allan R. said 1713 days ago:
Conspiracy Theory.I think you guys just discovered a new interesting way of making a DoS attack!, from home!!!
As innocent as end-users can be, I could set my browser to refresh a site I want to bring down for a whole weekend everysecond… then, when i get contacted by authorities or whoever, I would say that I just forgot to close the browser... Still the owner has to pay for the stolen bandwidth… and the site is probably down…
Andrew Donaldson said 1712 days ago:
My god this textbox is small in firefox without CSS enabled!Anyway, there is no conspiracy, just idiots. I remember mirroring a 700kb Anime style animated GIF on my space, only for it to get spammed on forums. That I didn’t mind, What I minded was that people started using it as their avatar. Lots of people. Every page load of every forum was sucking the image off my space. Because it hadn’t finished before the next ‘instance’ of it appeared, it started a brand new download.
Luckily I don’t pay for bandwidth (thanks to the recently deceased woaftech), so I only discovered this blatant misuse of my space when I installed webstats. Funnily enough the webstats also exposed a french website that had completely ripped off my site; By stealing the html and keeping the images on my space. Nice!
In both instances, the thieves were actually just idiots that didn’t know better.
David House said 1712 days ago:
The thing is, if that story’s correct, not only must they have an auto-reloader going, but an auto-cache-bypassing-reloading. In other words, their machine was electronically hitting Ctrl+F5 every two seconds, not just F5.Roman Filippov said 1702 days ago:
Sometimes that happens to IE when you use different background images on hover. It will request the hovered image every time you put a pointer over the link. Also I’ve seen that happen with some glitched out javascripts and IE, it was requesting the same images from the site over and over and over untill i left the page. It was going in a loop for preloaded js images. weird.