Starting my own website (newbie questions)

[cassandra1]

Maybe sometime in the near future, I'm thinking of making my own website. Probably not a tickling site, just a personal site with anything I feel like putting in. The problem though is that I'm a big newbie at this. I could try checking around the net for resources, but first I have a few questions regarding security.

1. Say I uploaded a number of photos on the site. If someone were to view and save all the photos onto his/her hard drive, will it cause any problems (aside from illegal activities. I'm talking about bandwidth problems)? And is it possible to know if someone has done that, without invading his/her privacy?

2. What about if someone links directly to the pics? Several websites I've been to have notices that say, "Please do not link directly to these pictures/files/documents/etc.". How will I know if someone is linking directly to a part of my site?

3. Exactly how expensive is bandwidth? Is it different depending on where I live?

4. Suppose I do start a tickling site and only members can log in to access the contents. If someone were to gain free access to the contents by, say, typing in the URL of the Members Only pages or typing random passwords until one of them gets him/her logged in (remember, I'm new at this, and my website might have loopholes here and there), can I consider him/her a hacker? Will I know if someone is doing this, and can I tell if he/she is a member?

 

[His Divine Shadow]

Lemme see here...

1. Eh? I don't understand your question. When visitors download files on your website it WILL use up your bandwidth. There is no way around this (Unless your host offers unlimited bandwidth.). Should your host offer cPanel (Most do), you will have a page where you can view what files were downloaded and by whom.

2. When viewing the logs I mentioned in #1, it is obvious when someone is direct linking because the location the log says the file in question was loaded from will be somewhere other than your website.

3. Bandwidth expenses vary dramatically. It all depends on the host.

4. Maybe not a hacker, but definitely a thief. It will be hard to tell if non-members have accessed members-only areas (Although some protection methods do offer logging of visitors.). There are ways to prevent it.

A last note: Not all hosts allow you to upload adult material (A catagory which includes most TK media), so be cautious.

 

[cassandra1]

1. When people download anything from my site, it uses up bandwidth. At about what rate is bandwidth lost? I mean, is it used up if someone downloads a single pic or a lot of pics? Does the size of the file matter when it comes to the amount of bandwidth lost?

2. Okay, but what problems will that cause? Bandwidth issues?

4. So if a non-member were to log in, I cannot tell if he/she is a non-member. It's about prevention rather than waiting for them to gain free access then. If such a person is considered a thief, do people normally notify the authorities, or do they ignore him/her since there was no harm done?

 

[MistressValerie1]

1. Bandwidth is directly proportional to the total number of files downloaded, multiplied by their size. If someone downloads 10 pictures of 100 kB each, the bandwidth used will be 1000 kB.

2. If someone hotlinks to images on your server, the bandwidth will be charged to you because it counts as a download from your site.

4. Normally you would lock out the IP address of a thief, and/or disable the password or account. Reporting to the authorities is usually a waste of time.

I hope this is of help.

 

[nessonite1]

2. What about if someone links directly to the pics? Several websites I've been to have notices that say, "Please do not link directly to these pictures/files/documents/etc.". How will I know if someone is linking directly to a part of my site?

Depending on the host you choose there may be a way to disable that so people can't do it (like what tripod does).

1. When people download anything from my site, it uses up bandwidth. At about what rate is bandwidth lost? I mean, is it used up if someone downloads a single pic or a lot of pics? Does the size of the file matter when it comes to the amount of bandwidth lost?

Say you have 5 gigs of monthly transfer. A 1 meg file (maybe a VERY big image or a small movie) that someone views will use up 1 meg of that 5 gigs.
Assuming you get a decent deal on hosting it would be very hard for a personal site to come close to the bandwidth limit. A BIG site with lots of pics and videos may need a beefier hosting plan though.

I don't know about the member/non member stuff. There are places you can go to get passwords to pretty much all the paysites so it's not somehting that is easily fixed without limiting uders to one IP address.

 

[cinnabar]

1. Most hosts provide bandwidth as a "bucket" on a monthly basis. So for example say you have 10 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. You have to be careful here as some hosts measure traffic coming from the server and traffic going to the server. So if you upload 1 gigabytes worth of files your first month, that is 9 gigabytes left for people to download those files. (These are extreme numbers as I'm almost certain you won't upload 1 gigabyte of files.). When the month ends (or billing cycle) your bandwidth is refreshed and you again have 10 gigabytes to work with.

Quite comparable to cell phone minutes. There should be no problems with people saving files to their hard drives. In fact I would recommend this if they are videos, as you want people to only download the file once and then watch it from their computer and not download it every time they watch it.

It is also possible to tell who downloaded what without invading privacy. Perhaps the best method is looking at general site statistics (which most hosts provide) that will tell which files were downloaded most frequently, and how many times they were downloaded. This can get much more complex depending on how much information you want.

 

[cinnabar]

2. If you want people to see the pictures and you don't care if they know they are on your site, then I would say it doesn't matter. If you are looking at a membership model to view pictures or even some kind of restricted access (only give out passwords to people you know) then there are several methods to avoid people "hot linking" your files. The easiest and most effective method is by way of a file named ".htaccess". Basically you can set it up so that it will check to see where they came from, and if they aren't coming from your site, it will display nothing to them. Bandwidth saved (yay!)

3. Bandwidth varies by host depending on how much you pay to them, again - think of it like minutes on a cell phone that you pre pay for and if they are not used, they do not roll over. If you need a web host, I have an excellent one to recommend that will allow adult material for $10/month with no setup and 20 GB bandwidth per month. I won't post the URL unless you request it here or via private message.

 

[cinnabar]

4. Very rarely do even large companies report those who break into their websites to any authorities. This usually only happens in cases where personal information (credit card numbers, SSN, etc) or private business files (private communications, source code) are taken.

The best way to avoid the problem in the first place is to implement a good security model. I would not restrict access based on IP address, because who's to say a member can't login from their home computer and then go to a friend's house and login?

One good way to keep logins/passwords from getting spread is to make sure that only a single person can login with any given account at once. So if someone logs in as bob and then someone else comes along and tries to log in as the same user while the first person is logged in - it will not let them. In the best case scenario this would be logged somewhere and you could see which IP addresses tried to login at the same time and then take appropriate action. (Block the account until you clarify who is really the owner and have them change their password).

I broke this up into a few parts because I didn't intend on answering more than in my first post, oops.

 

[cassandra1]

Wow, that's a lot of useful information. Thanks guys! 🙂 I'll drop by again if more questions come up.

 

[Melissa666]

New site huh? Well ill check it out but I like it here a lot. No one bugs me and I met some cool people. I think thats more of an issue when starting a website is the way the site is gonna be run. Is it gonna be run peacefully and somewhat democratically like here, or a big corrupt mess like the other big tickling site. Think about it. 😎

 

[MistressValerie1]

I think Cassandra is talking about a content site (like Foot Paradise, etc.), rather than an interactive forum like this 🙂

 

[cassandra1]

Yes Valerie. But remember though, I'm prone to changing my mind when it comes to starting any website.

 

[MÿTicklingStudios]

Cassandra - if you are looking for help. Send me an email to: [email protected] and I will give you free hosting and all the help you'll need in getting your site up and running.

I will also provide you with unlimited free bandwidth.

Just send me a mail with a simple plan for your website and we can take it from there and get you setup.