Invasion of the Bandwidth Suckers is a post on The Hickensian

To say that I’m fuming right now would really be an understatement.
Its bad enough having a live but unfinished site, and not getting time to work on it, but this took the biscuit, the teacup, and whole sweet trolley.

Earlier today, I had an email warning that I was currently 7gb over my 25gb a month bandwidth limit. WTF*?! In a panic, I added a new .htaccess file to redirect all pages to a basic holding page to try and slow it down a bit (please note: this was me, not SegPub. I didn’t get ‘cut off’). I later removed this after I’d calmed down a bit, but the fact remained, something fishy was going on.

Jeremy at Segpub tracked down the cause to a single IP address requesting the landscape image on the right, every second for the last 2 days! Thats over 700,000 times!

*Please note, thats the closest I’ve ever come to swearing on my blog.

Update: The admin of the network concerned contacted me to (sort of) explain what had happened – “I’m told he had found your page in a google search about BBedit, and had left a browser open at that page. I have no idea why the browser continued to download your image. I am convinced that it was an unfortunate accident,
though, and not done to cause you any harm.”. It also appears to be have been over 16 hours, rather than 2 days, and that it was someone who went home, leaving the page reloading.

This still leaves the issue of the reloading page. I’d seen this happening in IE only at the weekend. If anyone else can confirm that this is still happening, I’d be grateful. The image will probably reload on resize though.