I shall not steal… bandwidth
I’ve just checked our website statistics and i’ve found out that there was 72 GB traffic in November, which is about 20 GB more than we usually have. When I dug deeper I’ve found this:
There were more than 4000 requests in November for a MP3 file of the Giardini di Miro song “When you were a postcard”, resulting in more than 19 GB, almost 30 percent of the total traffic.
If we post a MP3 of a new release on our website, there are usually 1000 - 2000 downloads within the first month. But this file is more than two years old and not even linked from the startpage on our website.
So where do all the requests for this MP3 come from? The referral statistics didn’t reveal anything about it, so we assume that the MP3 was embedded in some other website: if anybody visits this site, a stream of “When you were a postcard” starts in the background (we’ve changed the name/path of this particular file, so we’ll see in a few days if the heavy traffic stops).
While we totally appreciate if someone links to the MP3s we offer here on 2ndrec.com, please don’t embed huge files like this in your own website. Please don’t stream MP3s from other servers on your website, because the traffic might explode. And website traffic isn’t for free. In our case it wasn’t a problem, because we have pretty much free bandwidth included in our hosting deal. But if we would have had a smaller hosting plan (like we’ve had a year ago), it would have cost us about 2 Euro for each additional gigabyte.
Anyway, if you are one of the “culprits” - we’re not mad at you. But please don’t stream MP3s from our server (or any other server which isn’t yours). It’s OK for us if you use the song on your website (as long as it’s a personal, uncommercial website and the music is credited properly), but please use your own webspace.