"Ouch!" said the server

Post by **Lost Marble** » Sat Feb 19, 2005 11:22 pm

Anyone ever visit memepool.com? On Thursday they linked directly to a large movie file in our gallery, and in the last 24 hours lostmarble.com served up well over 100GB of data. Poor server - that must hurt!

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 10:02 pm

Oooh, the Knor song is gone... I just love farting Dutch pigs...

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

Post by **Lost Marble** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 1:22 am

It'll be back once it drops off of memepool's front page. We ended up at over 34,000 downloads of that one movie in 2.5 days, so we just had to pull the plug.

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 1:48 am

Maybe a couple of those are people interested in animation and maybe you sell a few copies...that's where the gallery is for of course. In fact, that same animation was one of the first I watched. I believed it to be Flash at first but it was too intricate to be Flash I figured. And it turned out to be done in a little program called Moho. And I was sold and the rest is...well not much actually but that's not Moho's fault!

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

Post by **Lost Marble** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 3:54 am

Yes, it's true that the publicity might have been good, but they linked directly to the movie, and it's hard to tell how many people would have then typed in a modified URL to see what the rest of the website was about.

Plus, that download rate was just not sustainable for us.

jorgy · Post by **jorgy** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 3:55 am

nobudget wrote:Maybe a couple of those are people interested in animation and maybe you sell a few copies...that's where the gallery is for of course. In fact, that same animation was one of the first I watched. I believed it to be Flash at first but it was too intricate to be Flash I figured. And it turned out to be done in a little program called Moho. And I was sold and the rest is...well not much actually but that's not Moho's fault!

I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment, but wouldn't it have been better to link to moho's main site, or even the gallery itself, rather than directly to the movie? The way it happened, nobody even knew what software was used to create the movie.

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 10:24 am

Welcome to the reality of deep-linking... Yes it would have been better for Moho but not for the visitors of that weblog. "Go to that site and go to the gallery and find the little piggy picture..." You can't really do anything about deep-linking, well you CAN but those sites are usually very annoying.
It's a blow to the server and might cost Lost Marble a pretty penny but that's internet I guess. The complete link was visible so those actually interested in the technique will have no problem finding out where it came from. Lost Marble could start linking the gallery to the makers but that would leave them with many dead links at some point. And the blogger could have linked to the Dutch site where the animation was made for (actually Belgium if I'm not mistaken, it's made for a Studio100 television show) but it's history now.
Maybe Lost Marble should run the animations in a pop-up with a Lost Marble frame or something like that. "Made With Moho" stamped on there or in the credits. A nice "MwM" logo? Wait, I hear Macromedias lawyers calling, I'll be right back...

Well, if Lost Marble had stocks they would 've gone through the roof with this much attention!

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com

The400th · Post by **The400th** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 12:48 pm

You can stop deep linking with the .htaccess file.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 7:22 pm

On my old site I asked a friend to write an isapi dll that intercepted the file requests and if they didn't originate on our site they got a custom html page on our site, with a link to the file, but also with an explanation "the file you are accessing is on Visual Basic Explorer. If you would like to see the other files we have click here, if you would like to sign up for our newsletter click here, or click here to begin the download." We also served advertising on that page which -back in the days when banner ads paid well- offset the cost of our bandwidth for those downloads.

I'm sure you can do similar on your server by blocking the file but capturing the request and serving up a custom page. The other alternative might be to figure out a way to 'wrap' the example files -with the creators permission- so that they get a 'created using Moho' type popup when it is run?

Post by **Lost Marble** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 9:41 pm

It's not that we don't want to allow people to link to movies on our site - it's just that in this particular case, the traffic was too much. Memepool must get a lot of visitors, and lots of them may have emailed the URL to friends.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 4:15 am

My suggestion goes to the idea that people might see the direct linked file and not know where it came from so you'd get the hit with no benefit on them. That is a lot of traffic -wow. I know the same happens on cgtalk. Not sure if you have a monthly bandwidth limit but if so, and you aren't using it all, then you might want to deliberately post on those sites the last few days of the month. Sure to drag in some visitors.

nobudget · Post by **nobudget** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 11:52 am

Just put a little intro animation using the Moho logo and website before self-hosted files. "Made with Moho"/"Lose YOUR Marbles with Moho"/"Filmed in MohoMation"/"Your watching a Moho presentation". New contest suggestion; create a 5-10 second bumper for Lost Marble using Moho. Give high-res version of logo for download.

And many designers will only be proud to label their own work, how about "Made with Macromedia" / "THX certified" / "Dolby Digital". In fact, for some of those you have to PAY to include it...using DD is (almost) free, including the logo on your DVD sleeve costs money...hmmm getting off-topic here and burning valuable bandwidth

Reindert.
www.nobudgetvideo.com