Albanach.org web site down (temporarily!)

[M. A. C. Newsome]

Hi guys,

For any of you who may be attempting to access my web site, it went down sometime yesterday due to having exceeded my monthly bandwidth alottment.

Now, this happened to me once before as my site was growing in popularity and getting more traffic. The fix was easy. I just bought more bandwidth and the site was back up within minutes. At the time, I thought I was buying enough bandwidth to handle the growth in popularity of my site.

However, this time it's a little weird. Without giving away specific traffic stats, my bandwidth use has been slowly increasing, more or less doubling over the course of the year... untill now.

During the month of March, it looks like my bandwidth use has jumped up by a factor of 10! This is unprecidented. Especially since I have done nothing out of the ordinary to promote my site this month.

So I'm in contact with my "people" now about this (sounds like an H&R Bloc commercial, I know, but I have "people"). If my site really has suddenly become this popular, great. I'll be buying more bandwidth space. But if this is a technical glitch, or something more sinister like a hacker attack or something, they should be able to tell me what happened. And that will be fixed, too.

So, either way, my site should be back up soon. We're working on it. Thanks for being patient.

FYI, this is for my personal web site, www.albanach.org, and any dependant sites (like kilts.albanach.org or blog.albanach.org).

The Scottish Tartans Museum web site, www.scottishtartans.org, as well as its gift shop site, giftshop.scottishtartans.org, are completely unaffected. They are up and running perfectly fine.

Aye,
Matt

[Tattoo Bradley]

I was trying to access your blog last night and discovered this...

[JimB]

Matt,
I just wanted you to know that I regularly visit your site. I can't post comments there because of my internet police, but I can look. I always enjoy your insights. You do a good job.
Thanks!

[Caradoc]

So I'm in contact with my "people" now about this (sounds like an H&R Bloc commercial, I know, but I have "people"). If my site really has suddenly become this popular, great. I'll be buying more bandwidth space. But if this is a technical glitch, or something more sinister like a hacker attack or something, they should be able to tell me what happened. And that will be fixed, too.

I've had similar things happen to my own site, but since I host from a computer in my house I can generally see what the problems are.

Mostly it happens when I've got a picture posted on my site that other people decide they like. So it gets posted to some forum or another, and then I'm suddenly getting thousands of hits to a single picture that's being "passed around" via hotlinking.

You'll probably want to do a traffic analysis.

[Panache]

Matt,

Thanks for keeping us in the loop. I am also a frequent visitor to your blog.

Cheers

Panache

[M. A. C. Newsome]

Mostly it happens when I've got a picture posted on my site that other people decide they like. So it gets posted to some forum or another, and then I'm suddenly getting thousands of hits to a single picture that's being "passed around" via hotlinking.

Ever since I saw a photograph I took being used to sell goods on another commercial web site, I have disabled the "right click" option on my pages to prevent people from stealing my images.

I suppose this wouldn't stop people from directly linking to my images, though, would it? How do I go about checking to see if this is the case? (I don't know nearly as much about the technical side of the internet as I like to pretend I do!). :-)

~M

[Kilted KT]

(deleted)

[Warhoover]

Matt,

There are serveral things that can be done from the server side that your "people" can do. Also if your doing your own pages there are several techniques in the code for your site that you can do to stop hotlinking. I am not in my office at the moment to give you some links, but do a google search for "stop hotlinking html code" or something simular, and you will find several ideas out there that will help you out.

Slainte',

Brad

[M. A. C. Newsome]

Hi guys, and thanks for all the offers for help.

I have been in communication with my wonderful web diva, and she's been able to confirm that nothing overtly sinister is going on (or covertly sinister, for that matter). I'm apparantly just a popular guy.

(It seems my blog is amassing quite a bit of traffic).

So it's either upgrade my site or ask all you guys to stop reading it. Needless to say, I'm opting for the upgrade. The site should be back up and running soon. I'm going to make every effort to get this taken care of by the end of the day.

Thanks for all the concern!
Matt

[Kid Cossack]

Drat! Matt, I always look forward to your blog posts, very informative and frequently drool-worthy.