Website Update – Exceeding Expectations? or just Bandwidths.
Hi folks… we are closing in on exceeding our bandwidth limit again. I had to temporarily disable hotlinked images… this may affect the rss feed. I am working to implementing a system for managing this, however, I apologize for any inconvenice this may cause. (we’re on track to hit 2.6TB 
, and that means 1500$ if we don’t nip this in the bud, now). The site will still function, but outside links to images will fail.
Sorry if we let you folks down… we’re trying to grow and keep things working. I’ll use this post to communicate with you folks as we work out a better solution.
cheezburger
Update: I sent our host an email asking if we could up our BW without paying an outrageous huge amount of monies.
Update: Woke up this morning to find a lot of donations, this should be enough to pay for our some of the estimated exceeded bandwidth. In the mean time, I’ll work with our host to upgrade to even more bandwidth. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
Poor overworked cheezburgerz
I gives u cookies of the chocolate variety.
We still can has lolcats and r grateful. Most impawtant.
LOLcats expanding at amazin rate
lol… just trying to keep the site up … and fun.
but our idealism of keeping our site open and hotlinkable … site is doubling in traffic each month… we’re pulling more traffic than cars.com how is that pozzible? lol
like beans after dinner
i have a webserver, which i barely use, maybe you can move to this.. but i dont know how much space you need.
just talk to me if you are interested.
thx snoo.. our website would fit on a thumbdrive… it’s the bandwidth that keeps coming up as a problem…
. if you can offer us 3-5TB a month, let me know.
2.6TB…FOR LOLCATS! lol that’s awesome! …mostly… cept for the eatin ur walletz bit =(
Maybe you could do one of those “PLZ DONATES MONEYS” things on the sidebar somewhere or something. I mean, I doubt you’d grab $1500 in donations, but hey… they usually help at least a li’l bit.
I know I’d be happy to donate to the official Lolcat/lol* foundation
You can always just go to photobucket, sign up for the $25/yr pro account and have unmetered bandwith on photos you upload. Then instead of uploading the photo to your account, upload it to Photobucket, grab the code, paste it in, add your text and voila. Anyone can hotlink to their heart’s content.
Have you considered hosting the images on Flickr with a pro account?
Like, if people would use a service like http://www.imgred.com/ when they hotlink, like I do, then there’d be no trouble. But no, people are lazy/uneducated about services like imgred.com/are stupid.
Imgred is better than tinypic, etc., because you don’t have to save/reupload, you just pop http://www.imgred.com/ onto the front of the url, and you’re good to go. Automatic funtimes.
I say “THHHWWWWTTTTT” to hotlink pic peeples! If you really like an image and want to post it somewhere else, Photobucket has a feature that lets you upload directly from a web URL. I say they should upload it to there and host it themselves if they want to share a pic. Iz what I do!
And of course I always give credit to the cheezburgers and picture creators.
Agreed! Allowing people to hotlink images just encourages laziness (and rudeness!) Don’t let something like that come between us and our lol*, plz!
Just FYI — I get my cheezburgerz through the LJ feed and saw the default “no hotlinkz” image. Cool — so I clicked through to see the Gene Simmonz kitty…and when I returned to LJ the actual image was displayed. (I don’t want you to think it’s been disabled if it really hasn’t, because then we can has no cheezburgerz.)
Hotlinking is not a bandwidth issue, it’s an education issue. If ICHC encourages the creation of images with a script because people don’t have or know how to use a proper image editing software, it also encourages people to hotlink because they don’t know what hotlinking is or how it’s a problem.
Explain this issue to people in the simplest possible terms and disable hotlinking. It’s really about a choice – either you want the site to be available, or you want to be able to hotlink without effort – the latter is not worth losing the former.
anyone that wants to hotlink is able to do so even if hotlinking is disabled. there are simple tools on the web that bypass hotlink disablers by simply prepending an url to the beginning of the image.
I loaded the site to do my daily it’s almost lunchtime, let us have some lolz check and all the images are the antihotlinking lolcat. Even the background. So it’s a bit hard to read stuff without highlighting everything.
oh NOES!!
i think i helped break the intarweb.
Serge is wrong about people bein stupid/lazy (at least about me!), some people don’t *know* how the linking works – I’m guilty of teh hotlinkin but didn’t realize what i wuz doins.
i goes looks at teh hosting sitez now and figures it out.
please to be adding “host it yourself for dummies” instructions promininently on teh cheezburger site for other intern00bs liek me!!!
And now it’s working again. O.o
….*blames work*
Ooh!! the image redirect thing is super easy to use!
YAY!! now there can be lolcatz again.
I noticed that the pics show up in the RSS feed (I read your feed through a widget on my Google Homepage). Maybe removing the images from the feed would help ? Best of luck. Wish I had bandwidth to spare
Der alredi iz a Plz donayt munny link. It sez “SUPPORT US!!” and it haz pix of cheez & tofu burgarz. Go klik!! Is on rite-hand site of main payg, below site nooz.
–E
Huzzah for oyztar inlightinmint!! YAY!! Dat grayn of zand dat wuz hawtlynk iz now pearl ov imig redirekt.
Nowe I kutz u opin and eets u.
o wait. Mebby nawt.
I has mooched enuf. I is brownbagging delicious sandwich to donate lunch monies to cheezburger! Save teh endangerd lolcats! Not for to lose daily lolz; else why show up at werk?!
hey there, sorry i can only offer 50 gb
too bad, i really wanted to help.. i dig your site… its awesome.
Who is your hosting provider? 2.6TB is nuttin. You should check out Dreamhost, for 19.95/mo you get 3.6TB of bw to start out with and it goes up by 32GB per week. So by the next year, you will be at 5.2TB of bandwidth allowance for the same monthly rate. But hey if you do switch to dreamhost, make sure you put “pjb” as the one who referred you.
Faith, is mebbe ur browzer cache? 1ce u load piccies up, by looking at real site, returning 2 LJ feed doesn’t relode, uses saved filez on ur disk (nsted of fetching “no hotlinking” cat agin). feeture is sposed to make ur browzer faster by not asking teh intarnetz 4 pics agin.
Also, wow, is weird tryn splain cache in lolspeek.
Sabrina, thaz prolly it. I wuz just skurred of losing the lolcatz goodness.
All you image linkers: there’s a service called “imgred.com” that will greatly reduce the load on this server, and any other image sites you use. You just add “http://imgred.com” to the image address, and then the first time that page gets loaded, imgred.com will grab and cache the image, and from then on that page will only hit imgred.com for the image. Example:
img src="http://imgred.com/http://site.com/image.jpg">Hopefully this will help reduce the load a little.
Exceeding bandwidth is an awesome problem to have as long as you’re making enough money by the ads to support the costs. I hope you have a good analytics package installed so you can prove to future advertisers how much traffic you’re getting. You could be on the road to making some real money with the site! As someone who runs a couple of popular sites, I can empathize with your growing pains.
Best wishes!
Peter
The hotlink issue really springs up when someone hotlinks to the LiveJournal cat_macros group – there are nearly 6000 members of that comm with over 3000 who ‘watch’ it via friends lists, take into account multiple daily views of their friends page and you’re looking at a burger-bandwidth eating monster for onlyl one or two hotlinks. I say kill the hotlinking if it’ll keep the LOLCats coming, people can figure out saving the image and using another hosting service.
Have you considered getting a dreamhost account? their cheap plan has 2 TB of bandwidth, and the more expensive plans are better than that.
*clickz da supportzbutton*
Seriously, just disable hotlinking permanently. Webmasters understand.
I has see too manys “PHOTOBUKKIT BNADWITH ESXEEDED” mesagis to trus dem.
Elfnow iz litl scaries.
Hi Peter. Small world!
I’m not a techie, so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t hotlinking (linking directly to the original photo) preferred over having people saving copies of your photos all over the place and then having your stuff floating all over the Internet and nobody knowing where it came from or to whom it belongs?
I understand about the bandwidth issues, but how otherwise do you make sure people aren’t stealing credit for your photos?
It isn’t preferred saving and giving credit is preferred.
May I ask why dont you go and buy a seperate account for your images?? that way you can have a cheap domain cost and then a cheap hosting for images cost. there are a lot of places who offer great TB bandwidth.
Either that or have you purchased a server??
server not problems… TUBES is problems
My hosting is currently running about $9.95/mo and I have 2.4TB/month transfer available. It sounds to me like maybe you just need to spread the load out a bit somehow, or find a cheaper host! Dreamhost may not be the PERFECT host sometimes, but for the price, you can get an asstardload of bandwidth.
Agreed. Hotlinking is for jerks.
Do wuteva u have to do to keep goin! I luvs dis site
Makes me happies.
Blame Fark users for hotlinking your pics there.
Told you to block myspace hotlinking.. but did you listen?
I didn’t know about http://www.imgred.com/ ! But now that I do I’ll be using it all the time. Thanks!!
You can try to use Coral Cache links for images, that might help a lot:
http://www.coralcdn.org/
Just add “.nyud.net:8080″ right after the “.com” — for example:
http://www.icanhascheezburger.com.nyud.net:8080/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/durrr.jpg
We can’t verify that myspace is hotlinking the most Pete.
That’s the biggest problem. 
We can’t just go willy-nilly blocking sites… because it’s part of the webs… and we have my myspace friends, as well as lj friends, and fark friends. it’s a little complicated. or maybe i’m just too chzbrgr’y and not enough it/sysadmin’y.
Dump the hotlinking feature- u r bein 2 nice! We all luuurrrrrve the (insert type of)burgers’ efforts and site, and support lolcats with cash-monies.
[quote comment="6700"]lol… just trying to keep the site up … [/quote]
Mabey der is pils fr dis?
Sumbudy tol me.
[quote comment="6709"]Like, if people would use a service like http://www.imgred.com/ when they hotlink[/quote]
I can has ImgRed wif my AllYouCanUplodes too??
cheezyburger you could never let us down.. we loves you and tofuburger..
As somebody who recently hotlinked to a few images (partly to promote the site to friends) you may want to make it clear somewhere upfront that it’s *okay* to make personal copies of the pics instead of hotlinks.
I know some sites frown on that kind of thing for copyright or tracking reasons, so may want to say upfront you prefer people make copies rather than hotlink.
I’ll go fix my blog entry accordingly.
yeah, that and dead photobuket links. plus i think teh lolrus would feel bad
Love the site, but unfortunately I’m not any good at the cat language spoken here.
Have you considered hosting your images at Amazon S3? $0.20 per GB per month for transfer, $0.15 per GB per month for hosting/drive space. You only pay for what you use.
‘pends… wich u want moar? Faems, or moneys?
Bests is peeps savign copys AND making linkbacks AND givings teh props. But moast not so thurrow.
can’t do that… flickr has a pretty complicated image hosting agreement, some of which we may violate. take down would be swift, me tinks.
When we moved to the new server, I monitored the traffic… we were on track to stay within our bandwidth alottment even with hotlinking. Unfortunately, more traffic than I expected is coming and uploads are eating up a bigger portion of our bandwidth costs… those two put together blows my assumptions out of the water. So it’s my bad.
:-/ — we don’t mind hotlinkers if we can serve it.
We were with dreamhost paul. and we hit 2.0 TB of use, but this caused a spike in the connections on their shared plans… which they then throttled us down… and asked us to find a dedicated host.
we’ve been in the queue for dreamhost dedicated… which is a month wait.
I agree with the “stopz teh hotlinkz” camp. But, I also trust that you guys will do what’s best for you and the site.
As soon as I have teh monies, again, I’ll help you guys out. (As it is, I need to come up with monies for my own site. Oh… and food… haha… silly me!)
*kisses* for all the _____burgrz – you guys are hardworking peeplz.
Actually, you can tell from the access logs and statistics reports! A good statistics program should be able to tell you how many images were referred from sites other than your own.
It’s okay, I understand you lurve myspace and can’t bear to shut them off =P
well I helpz.
I donatez. 
yay! U can haz mah cheezburgars!!
I finkz I has lotz of kawffyz rite den. Kawffyz iz gud.
sees above – they wuz already wif dreemhozt.
well I SURE R INTERRIGENTZ!
…
or not… how the hell did I not notice that be4? lol
I’ll be sure to toss ya some burgerz at the end of this weeks when i ain’t so brokeadid:D
There are a bunch of things you can do to cut down. Without knowing how much of the bandwidth problem is from hotlinking and how much is simply from everyday readers here are some suggestions
a) show fewer lolcats per page. Looks like it’s 10 posts per page, but it’s only 2 or 3 new posts a day most times, so people who make a point of looking once a day will be using unnecessary bandwidth if the pictures aren’t cached.
b) get something that makes thumbnails for the main page and rss feeds. People can click to get the full pic if they want to/read the comments. Although I don’t mean tiny thumbnails, I mean decent sized so you can still see all the funny.
c) I’d look into how much extra bandwidth any of the cool new things are adding, like the new comment arrangement (I personally hate tree views anyway) and this nifty comment preview thing. Certainly not much compared to the images, but any place that makes a difference will help.
a) good idea…
. let’s see how 8 works.
b) been trying to research this.
c) good point, i think the biggest hog is quoter… gonna disable now.
Hey guys. You should check out Dreamhost.com.
i’m not hosted with them (have my own server) but you could go with them and get 3.8 tb for $79 a month.
Better yet, you could run a dedicated server on an unmetered port for cheap dollars too.