New hotlinking rules
The ability to hotlink to images is an important part of ImageHost.org. However some users have been abusing this feature by hotlinking to large full size images from very active message boards. For this reason I’ve tweaked the hotlinking rules to discourage this practice. Any image you want to hotlink to now needs to be less than 250 KB in size and the image’s resolution needs to be less than 1000×1000 pixels.
These new limits should hardly bother anyone wanting to use ImageHost to hotlink to an avatar or signature, but will prevent users from hotlinking to say, their wallpaper collection. You can of course still upload images that go over these limits, but you will need to use thumbnail or text links instead.
I realize there may be users who just want to share their images and don’t know or can’t be bothered with resizing those images to acceptible sizes, so I’ve added a resize feature to my “to do” list. Once this feature is done, you can have ImageHost.org resize the images to acceptible size after upload for you. Unfortunately I can not give an ETA on this feature though.
Update March 13: It seems a pretty major bug caused hotlinking to images of any size or resolution to be not allowed, which confused one important ImageHost.org user (my mother) a lot. This bug has now been fixed – I apologize for any inconvinience caused. In addition I’ve upped the limits a bit (500 KB & 1600×16000 pixels), so only considerably large images will not be eligable for hotlinking.
Update March 23: Received some complaints, hotlinking is currently back to old limits again.
|
March 12th, 2009 at 20:20
Is this the reason why the server seems to be down today, at least where I’m at and according to downforeveryoneorjustme.com
Hope everything is okay…
Thank you for the great service!
-tmo
March 12th, 2009 at 21:01
No, the downtime is unrelated to this. I’m currently waiting for the server to come back up; it seems to be stuck running “fsck” (Linux equivalent of Scandisk/chkdsk). Considering the server has several million files on it, this might take some time.
Hopefully that’s all there is to it, because if the drive really has corrupted it’s going to take some effort getting the site back online. But I do have backups, so it will certainly be back online sooner or later.
March 12th, 2009 at 21:12
Ahhh – thank you for the update. Obviously it’s just the fsck process and not a corrupt sector or anything… Good luck! Best wishes! =-)
March 15th, 2009 at 22:12
Thank you for the amendment… I promise I won’t be hotlinking my wallpaper collection. ;D
Good to know you’re on top of the ball.
Any news on possibility of a login feature yet?
March 17th, 2009 at 07:58
Thank You for this service – all good things to You!
kind regards
Wolfgang
March 27th, 2009 at 04:35
http://g.imagehost.org/view/0729/Barrel_RollTHUMB
Is the image above allowed to be hotlinkable or not? Just wondering because I did it and it appeared Ok when I did, but then it eventually disappeared.
The hotlink code has to appear in the codes below the image for it to be allowed, yes? Because this image is smaller than the March 13 limits, what are the limits now? 250KB and 1000×1000?
Sorry if I did when I wasn’t supposed to
Thanks for the answer, and the awesome service
Again sorry if I went against rules 
March 27th, 2009 at 10:08
The image should be hotlinkable, but apparently was uploaded during a time that the limits were more strict. Whether an image is hotlinkable or not is determined at the time of upload. So when I changed the rules, those changes did not apply to any image already uploaded before.
When I uploaded your image again today, it (as expected) can be hotlinked:
http://g.imagehost.org/view/0612/Barrel_RollTHUMB
Sorry for the confusion. I know it’s in the best interest of ImageHost.org to have the service be as easy to use, and this messing with hotlinking rules wasn’t helping
PS. Do not try to hotlink using the “get image location” function of your browser if the URL starts with imagehost.org/dl/. Those kinds of URLs are hotlink protected and will stop working after several hours or several downloads, whichever comes first.
April 30th, 2009 at 16:08
Dear GHDpro,
I am the representative of a Chinese Anime forum, the SOS Group. http://imagehost.org is very popular in the forum, many people are building up wallpaper collections using the wonderful “thumbnail preview” function, as can be demonstrated by http://www.sosg.net/read.php?tid=268241 this post. The speed of ImageHost is very fast, and its convenient user
However some of the recently uploaded pictures are unable to be displayed properly in the forum. I am writing this to ask whether our forum have caused a significant burden to your bandwidth– because we all know that these days, it is increasingly difficult to find such a easy-to-use image hosting website. And we all treasure this. if possible, can we set up an agreement of some sorts, that we regulate the use of your service, and encourage people to use the thumbnail previews rather than full size images?
We sincerely thank you for all the efforts made to provide such a wonderful service. And I personally hope that my signatures and avatars will remain to be safe in ImageHost’s hands.
Thank you once again!
Representative Admin AzureTimm@SOSG
April 30th, 2009 at 19:37
I have been banning various websites recently, including many Chinese ones, from using the hotlinking feature (and force them to use thumbnails and use less bandwidth). However any such measure should not have any impact if you and fellow users are already using thumbnails to link to large images. Plus, being an anime fan myself I am kind of biased and would not ban your site as quickly as I do some others.
However, the server which hosts e.imagehost.org and f.imagehost.org was down for approximately 6-7 hours today, which is probably the cause of the issues you experienced. The server is back up now, so everything should work again. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Some interesting stats: users from sosg.net have caused approximately 13 million hits and 895 GB of traffic (of which 2.2 GB in the last hour).
April 30th, 2009 at 22:11
Dear GHDpro,
Indeed, the images in question are now restored, the speed is, as usual, very nice and fast.
Please do not apologize; we should be thanking you. Being fast and free all along, IH is part of the forum now. The forum will lose half its pictures without IH generously hosting them. So really, we owe you a huge favor.
“Some interesting stats: users from sosg.net have caused approximately 13 million hits and 895 GB of traffic (of which 2.2 GB in the last hour).”
Woosh, that’s really significant= = and mind you, it was about midnight in China.
I will draw up a notice in the forum to encourage people to use thumbnails more often, and hopefully we can save you some more bandwidth. With that being said, ImageHost is really popular there, with 50,000 active users out of 500,000 registered users, even though we all use thumbnails, it could still be a huge burden to your bandwidth. I do not know any other way to help you rather than donations, but the website of SOSG itself is set up by a group of anime lovers who are just students, and we very well know how much fast-speed internet connections and server hosting can cost. Advertisement only cover for a small fraction of the cost; we are throwing our own money into the pond as well.
I can only hope that the notice I am about to set up will work, for we really love ImageHost and don’t want it to close its doors to us.
Thank you very much once again. We appreciate your favor.
With all the best wishes,
AzureTimm@SOSG.net
May 1st, 2009 at 09:09
Don’t worry about it to much… there are sites using way more.
Both ImageHost.org servers currently use about 20TB per month (40TB/month total), which means about 40-60 GB per hour at peak times. Plus the figure I quoted for sosg.net wasn’t per month – it was “all time”.