Vamped.net

The term "bandwidth" generally refers to the amount of data that is transferred or downloaded from the website server to the end user, not the actual amount of data that is stored on the site.

For example, many people who post on this board have their own Fan Art or wallpaper websites. They may have 100 different wallpaper designs on their site, and let's say each wallpaper is 100 kb. That means their total data stored on their server is 10,000 kb or 10 mb. (Of course the total MB stored on the site would be more than that, with the html pages and thumbnails and banners, but I'm just using round numbers.)

The bandwidth, though, refers to how many wallpapers are actually viewed or downloaded by the site visitors, generally over a month's time. So if the site gets 100 visitors a day, and each person downloads (or views) 10 wallpapers per visit, then the bandwidth used per day is 100,000 kb or 100 mb. Then over a month, that would be approximately 30,000 mb or 30 GB per month. So that website uses 30 GB per month in bandwidth.

When you look at hosting plans offered by web hosts, the plan will usually have a storage limit AND a bandwidth limit. For example, a host may offer 100 mb storage and 20 GB of bandwidth transfer per month for a price of $19.95 per month or something like that. If your site uses more bandwidth than what your host allows, you can be socked with huge fees for exceeding your bandwidth allotment for the month.

When people use the term "stealing bandwidth," it means that you are sucking up a lot of extra bandwidth from that site. When somebody posts a picture on a FF message board, or any other site for that matter, you are basically forcing people to download that pic over and over, every time they load that thread, even if they don't want the pic or they've seen it a million times before. Imagine how many people view the "Cherishing" thread on the main Roswell board every day. Each person who downloads the thread is sucking up bandwidth from the website that is hosting all the pictures posted, because the picture is downloaded again and again and again by every person viewing the thread . . .

Does that make sense??

That is why posting pictures from a fansite, especially LARGE pictures like wallpaper, is very, very bad and can cost that website a lot of $$ in server fees. If the site is on a paid host, it really is stealing, and it's just not nice. Especially when the website specifically asks its visitors NOT to post the pictures anywhere else on the web.