We’re back! As in my website is back up, after being down all weekend. Thank you so much to my wonderful hosting company, ElectricKitten, for resetting my bandwidth (and giving me a bit extra) with no extra charge. I love my host so much.
Of course, this shouldn’t have needed to happen at all, in a perfect world where people weren’t parasitic dickholes. Because you see, the reason my site was down all weekend was because on Friday around noon, a high traffic site called “celebfeednow” hotlinked to an Iron Man gif I put in a blog post three years ago. One of several gifs that I had found on tumblr, and like a responsible non-asshole, had then hosted locally when I wanted to use them. And let’s be honest, it’s not like tumblr is hurting for bandwidth, but it’s good internet hygiene.
But anyway, because “celebfeednow” is a bag so inconceivably full of dicks that I fear there will now be a world dick shortage, they hotlinked to an image and thus ate my site’s entire bandwidth allowance for the entire month in less than three hours, and my site got automatically cut off.
I have since renamed the image and turned on hotlinking prevention, so hopefully this will not happen again. But I cannot state clearly enough how upsetting and stressful this was for me. I’m unemployed now. I’m job hunting. My little website is one of the places I send people to for my publication list when they want additional writing samples. I didn’t know if I was going to have to cough up extra money when I’m suddenly freaking out about my income. This was one more fucking thing I did not need to deal with in my life when I’m already having hysterical ugly laughing fits every time I look at my freshly arrived COBRA paperwork.
And seriously, where the fuck does a site like “celebfeednow” get off on hotlinking to anyone? They have the bandwidth. Host your own fucking images, assholes. Pay your own goddamn bills.
Fucking parasites.
Don’t hotlink images. Unless they’re from something like XKCD, where hotlinking is specifically stated to be A-okay, DO NOT HOTLINK IMAGES. Pay for your own fucking bandwidth instead of stealing it from someone else. Particularly if you have a high traffic site. I didn’t know we had to start off the week with a reminder that stealing is wrong, but there we go.
Anyway, we’re back, hopefully to stay, and I have other things to write.