Posting Images on 9622.net

What's all this talk about "stealing bandwidth"?

Many people, especially those who don't make their living on the web, don't understand what's meant by "stealing bandwidth". Here's the scoop:

Think of the internet like a city's water system, with thousands of pipes delivering water where it needs to go. As a consumer, you pay based on how much water travels through those pipes. The same is true for the internet--except instead of the end user paying for how much he receives, the website owner pays based on how much she sends.

Whenever you look at a website, you're "pulling" information from the web server to your computer. The user gets to decide how much traffic the website owner has to send and, therefore, how much she'll have to pay to keep her site running. Because they are so much larger than ordinary text files, transferring lots of images can be very expensive. Some site owners have been forced to close shop after receiving a monthly bill from their web host for thousands of dollars.

Now, if I find an image on the web at www.foobar.com/susie.jpg, and post the image on 9622.net, then every time someone looks at the 9622 page, they pull the image from foobar.com, and traffic from foobar grows. Foobar ends up paying for 9622.net's traffic. And, since the user isn't actually seeing the foobar.com website, foobar loses out. Big time.

What's the solution?

If you have your own website, or even some web space that your ISP provides (many do), it's easy. Take the image from foobar.com (right-click on the image, Save As...) and download it to your local machine. Then upload it to your web space and use that url to post the image on 9622.net. Make sure you give credit to foobar.com when you do.

If you don't have your own server space, there are sites out there who will provide you space to host images. Photoisland.com and picturestage.com are two popular ones. And a quick Google search brings up a couple of other free ones (2and2.net and tupics.com) and others at very minimal cost (here).

Why can't we put images on 9622.net itself?

The costs to host and maintain 9622.net are paid by a few loyal monkeyfriends, most of whom are unemployed and (for reasons of hygiene) unemployable. It's a miracle you're even able to read this, trust us. If we hosted all the images that are posted here, the site would be gone inside of six weeks. And no one wants that. (Well, maybe someone does. OK, lots of people do, but we don't, and we're runnin' the joint.)

Anyway, we love seeing the images that are posted here. They often make us laugh. But we don't want to fling poo on anyone else's ice cream. So please, don't steal others' bandwidth. It's not the Monkey Way.

Thanks,
The Administrators of 9622.net