Has someone hijacked my site?
 

I don't want to be accused of spamming so I won't post the link. But I have a personal page with personal crap, like construction in my basement, etc. Nothing special and nothing to sell. Basically, my family and friends look at it. Since November, I have had about 6,800 hits.

Then last night, bellsouth said I had exceeded bandwidth. Today, I have 78,000 hits through 2:30 p.m.

I think someone has hotlinked a picture of USC's new helmet off my website, and it is screwing up my counter. Is this possible?

If so, how can I check to see who is doing it?

Can I see if that many people really are hitting my site or if my counter has gone haywire?

Thanks!

Sounds like if you exceeded bandwidth, the counter is right.

Its entirely possible that someone is hotlinking. Do you have access to the logs?

Thanks. How do I get access to logs?

Depends on your webserver...

Are you running your own server, or is the site hosted by someone else? (did you upload the site to your hosting provider?)

If you're hosting the site yourself, you should be able to view the access log, and determine who caused the hits. (check for 'referer' info)

"Hijacked" isn't really the right term, btw. Somebody may well have linked to you and is sending a lot of unwanted traffic your way, but that's real different from anything you could call "hijacking".

"Freeloading" might be a better term, if they're using images hosted on your site for their own purposes... But if that 78k number is from a counter embedded on your front page, that's almost certainly NOT what it is.

It is. And before my site crashed again today, the counter was at 110,000. I have never seen anything like it. I was concerned someone "stealing" my webspace, i.e. taking my traffic.

for the time being just put in a blank index.html file into your main page (or somthing VERY small) .

deleting the index.html will only cause the entire main directory to list, which cost a lot of bw.

Try to get hold of the referral list of where all your visitors are comming from, that will tell you A LOT.

And if you get a hold of who is stealing your file...

Change the image to something really nasty, or a message noting that this particular jerk doesn't host his own stuff. But keep the file name the same as what is being leeched. That way your new and offensive image will show up on their site.

Then replace the image on your site with the original image, just renamed to something else.

Thanks.

I'm pretty sure, in this case, that a URL wouldn't be bad as it would give us all a chance to poke around and see if we can find the source of the linkage (via google, yahoo, msn, etc).

are you linking that little avatar of yours off of your site.

that might cause some traffic

That's where you gotta put a link to the TFP on your site. We'll happily absorb some of those hits along with you :P

im 99% sure its the website linked to the www button, right?

counter is at 337k lol

i wouldnt be surprised if one of the pictures of the girls was hotlinked lol

I figured it out. The counter was actually going haywire, but in so doing, it was causing hits. The remote log showed that 123counters was hitting it for 500,000 hits.

Mail them an invoice for the bandwidth they used.