So as it turns out, the anime community is full of freeloaders who think bandwidth grows on trees. Here’s an interesting fact you may not know: it doesn’t. The server is in Australia, where bandwidth is actually rather expensive. The site used 3.72Gb of bandwidth in September, and I can tell you from looking through the Apache stats that a fair chunk of hits were not from actual page views on this site or hotlinked through my own use. I estimate around 20% of the hits this month have been hotlinks not of my own. I know this is very rough, but if you take 20% of 3.72Gb, that’s a whopping 700Mb of bandwidth.
So I’ve decided to put a stop to that before it grows out of control. From today, hotlinking from sites other than what I’ve allowed will not work. You’ll instead get a pleasant picture of a LOLcat with cheese on its face. You may also get this if you’ve got the HTTP referrer header turned off in your browser, and if you do, stop being a paranoid bastard.
On to the second and more obvious change. Because of the sheer amount of data this site uses, I’ve thrown up some small Google ads to offset running costs a little. I don’t expect to actually make any profit from the ads, since they seem to think this site is about pudding. Wonder what gives it that crazy idea.
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