(What it is and what it means.)
Bandwidth is the total amount of resources that are used by a web site for a one month period. It is figured in bytes of information. When a person goes to a web site, as soon as that first page starts to download, bandwidth is being used. The background graphics, the title graphics, midi files, and streaming and downloadable audio files all use bandwidth. This is a normal thing for any web page or web site.
When people start linking to files on another web site, it becomes a problem. Let's say that a person comes to visit bigdummys.com and finds a wav file "Blade." That person thinks "Hey, this would be great on my web page. I'll just link to this wav file and it can play from my page. Cool!" Well, it's not so cool for the bigdummys.com web site owner. This is what happens. The file size for "Blade" is 1,015,808 bytes. Let's say the other person has 50 hits on their page per day, and of those fifty visitors, ten of them click on the wav file "Blade." In a twenty four hour period 10,158,080 bytes (10 megabytes) of bandwidth has been taken from bigdummys.com. Multiply this by 30, a one month period, it comes to 304,742,400 bytes (304 megabytes). And that's just for one file! You can imagine how high the figure can be when there are a number of web pages or websites that engage in this practice. In some cases, the person who direct links to a song or a graphic doesn't know any better and has no idea of the problems they are causing for the web site owner. I have found sites, though, that know exactly what they are doing and just don't care. Why should they? They don't have to pay for it.... but the website they're stealing bandwidth from sure does.
Many music and graphic sites on the internet are folding or shutting down because they are being presented with bills that can run into the thousands from their internet hosting services. Others are switching to password-protected sites and some are charging fees to cover their bandwidth costs. If the bandwidth theft and direct linking continues, we may very well see an end to free multimedia on the internet. Thankfully recent awareness of this theft, yes it is theft, by hosting services are working with other web site owners and hosting services to remove the illegal links thus saving monies for all.
If you like a particular website, make a link to their pages, not their sounds or their graphics. Links to 'pages' are the only links that should be used.
*NOTE: bigdummys.com actively monitors all files on its web site for such activity and enforces a 'do not link directly to graphics, sounds, movies policy' on its website. If any illegal links/theft are found we try to contact all parties to inform them of the theft and to have such links removed. WARNING- We also at times will replace the file(s) that are being linked to with "highly shocking" & 'GRAPHIC' (like what can be found on rotten.com) image(s)/sound(s) to encourage the illegal link removal ASAP.
Thank You
--bigdummys.com