How to tell if someone is using your bandwidth

All right, so you are concerned about someone stealing your bandwidth. I'm sure the next question in your mind is how do you find out who is the culprit and what they are stealing.

If you suspect a website

It's relatively simple if you already have suspicions about a particular web site. You can check their source code, looking for the <img src tag. If you find your URL you've find bandwidth theft.

Also look for a BASE tag, as they could, if they were very clever, change their base URL to your site, then reference their own site with absolute URLs. This isn't very intelligent, but it's been known to happen.

You will also want to look for other things:

• Look for the BGSOUND tag to see if they are swiping your sound files for their background sound.
• Look for EMBED tags
• And look for the A tag referencing your ZIP or other files.

Use Altavista to help

Okay, now you want to know how to find those sites that are stealing your bandwidth. After all, with over a billion web pages out there it would be impossible to look at them all.

You can use Altavista to search for your image files. For example, to find all of the image files on the Internet Tips And Secrets site, you would enter the following line in the search box:

image:www.internet-tips.net

If your site is on Geocities or something, just include the entire URL (www.geocities.com/mysite/etc) and it will find everything linked to it. Note that this only finds sites which are submitted to the search engine, but it's a start.

Check your server log files

The most reliable approach is to check your server log files directly. If you are on a free host such as Geocities, you are out of luck as you don't have access to those logs. However, some hosts (Bizland and Addr.Com are two of these) allow you direct access to your own server logs. In this instance it is a simple matter of downloading the log files and checking them out.

Additional Information

• Bandwidth stealing Bandwidth stealing is the linking to images or scripts from another site without permission, thus using that sites bandwidth without compensation.
• Getting Revenge On Bandwidth Stealers Got someone stealing your bandwidth and he won't stop? Here are some suggestions.
• Sins of the internet- Bandwidth Stealing This sin costs hosts millions of dollars a year - and often you don't even know that you did it!
• Htaccess file - Redirect You can redirect visitors to other pages using the redirect function of htaccess.
• HTML tag reference guide - <META http-equiv refresh>