Please Don’t Hotlink
Hi guys!
You’ve probably been experiencing a bit of slowness this week (particularly today) and lag time on Musings or maybe you’re having a problem even getting to the site.
I know I’m having a hard time logging in to post today or even answer comments as I’ve had to reboot my server several times this morning because of a heavy load on it. The past few days has been the worst because I’ve had various forums across the world hotlinking images from my site.
Basically hotlinking is embedding an image that is still served on my server. This means everyone is accessing that image on high traffic forums and causing serious lag time here or even in some cases bringing the entire website down. I’m already using all my system resources and paying quite a good deal of money to do so. At this point it’s either move my entire site to a new server and pay a higher host fee or just hopefully urge others to stop hotlinking.
There aren’t any shortcuts for stopping this sadly without causing havoc to my site and feed.
I’m telling you this in the hopes you might help me out. If you see anyone hotlinking my images please urge them to remove the image and either link to the original post or upload the photo to the site they are on and just source www.musingsofamuse.com.
This morning the problem seems to be originating from QVC forums, MUA, and an International forum however this pretty much happens alot everywhere including blogs that grab my images and hotlink them.
Thanks, any help is appreciated.
Sorry to bug you with this!