[OT] YIKES! Bandwidth disaster

I got an email from my ISP today saying that I've used 25 *gigabytes*
of bandwidth this month, and at this rate, I will end up owing $193 at
the end of the month. Of course, I assumed this was a mistake, because
I never use anywhere near that much. So I called them, and the guy I
talked to said that it certainly looked like a mistake. I do save a
bunch of files on my home directory and web space, but it comes to
maybe 50 megabytes, including some jpgs and wav files and lots of big
text files. Nowhere near 25 GB.

Tonight I got home and there was a phone message from them saying that
the big usage of bandwidth came from the fact that I got about 400K hits
on my webpage, because of those pictures of the scotch tape sculptures.
My father had sent me an email with the photos, and I'd created a little
HTML file that did nothing but display the pictures, and posted the link
on this newsgroup.

Well, somebody reading it here thought the pictures were extremely cool,
and posted my link onto stumbleonit.com, resulting in thousands and
thousands of people coming to look at the pictures on my site. Hey, it's
flattering, but very, very expensive flattery. All those downloads tap
the resources of the server, and someone's gotta pay for it. But, yikes!

At the end of the phone message, the guy said I should call him back
tomorrow and he'd "see what he could do for me". I really hope they'll
give me a break because this is the first time this has happened with
my site, in my many years of using their service. I was naive and stupid
and didn't realize what might happen. I also didn't realize that I would
be held responsible for all that bandwidth. Duh.

All I can say is, I'm never going to do that again! I'll probably put
stuff on my site, but I'm not going to post it publicly anymore. Too
bad, but I can't take that risk again.

Joyce - poorer but wiser