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The time that Neil Gaiman accidentally cost me £2k
Gather ye round, you fans of the insanely talented Mr Gaiman, for I have a tale to tell you that will gladden the heart, and prove what a decent, nice bloke Neil really is.
(and sorry Neil - I know this'll embarrass you and prove to the world what a fundamentally kind person you are: what can I say - sorry mate: your cover's blown! I've told this story many times in person to people I found out were fans of your work, and it's now time for everyone else to find out!)
So for many, many years now (24 actually!) I have run this Bryan Talbot fanpage, writer and artist of comics, graphic novels and illustrations and it has been a blast! - I've been able to meet my hero, work creatively with him on several projects, I always get advance free review copies of his graphic novels and I have even been featured in a comic of his - Heart of Empire - as a character!
Working on Bryan's site over the years has even led to me having a dayjob career in online and social media marketing, so yes: it has been a totally rewarding and fulfilling hobby that's led to many great things.
But, I hear you say "what has this got to do with Neil Gaiman?" - well: let me elaborate. Bryan has been the artist on many of Neil's comics - a lot of the Sandman was drawn by Bryan and written by Neil, and they also worked on other comics together: one of which is From Homogenous to Honey, which was a protest against proposed homophobic legislation in the UK in 1988 and showed what would happen if all fey and homosexual influences were removed from society.
So obviously the fandoms of Bryan and Neil overlap to a large extent, and we often link to each other's websites. I've always known that Neil has a much larger fanbase than Bryan, and I have to admit there's been times I wished Bryan was just as famous as Neil... - mainly because I want to see the movie versions of all of Bryan's comics right now! And anyway - trying to tell people about Bryan's work is the reason I set up the fanpage and have run it for so long.
So one day I am doing my usual updates on the fanpage, and I log into Google analytics to check out the traffic, and there is just this HUGE, insane spike in traffic: I mean - one page in a single day got the equivalent of the entire year's worth of regular traffic!
At first I am ecstatic: I think this kind of attention can only come from being frontpage news on some major site, and that I will get a big boost in regular visitors as people come back to see what Bryan is working on next after finding out about him.
The problem is - it is just one spike in traffic to one image on one page: my site and everything I do to make people aware of Bryan and try and get them to become fans has not been shown in anyway. What has happened is that someone has "hotlinked" to the image. (a hotlink is when someone shows an image on their site that is actually hosted on a different site: it means that you pay for any hosting charges associated with that image, whilst the other site gets to display it without having to pay those same hosting fees.)
The image in question was (of course!) the From Homogenous to Honey comic by Neil and Bryan.
So right then all I thought was "huh: it's a shame they couldn't link to the whole page and not just a single image, but hey: what are ya gonna do?"
That was what I thought until I got the next bill from my hosting company. Which was £2,000! - which was kind of a lot since I usually paid £75 or so per year! The deal I had was common back then: up to a certain amount of traffic to my site I paid a fixed fee: I would only pay more in "excess bandwidth" if I actually used it - and when I set up the deal I looked at the average traffic I got each year, and selected a deal that gave me more than 5 times that amount as part of the fixed price setup.
Until this hotlinking issue arose it'd been perfect. Now though I was really panicking - no way could I afford to pay that much for hosting the site - especially when it was someone else basically stealing my bandwidth and therefore my money!
So I investigated where the link had come from - and found out it was from Neils own blog.
This really disappointed me, so I fired off an email to the website owner (not Neil himself - the person who actually did all of the updating of the site) and to this day I am eternally grateful for the fact that I did not swear in the email at all (despite feeling justified to!) and said something along the lines of "Dude! - what the hell is this?! - I thought there was an unspoken agreement amongst those who volunteer to run the websites of famous authors - we just don't do this to each other! - your hotlinking has cost me over TWO THOUSAND QUID!!"
To which Neil's webmaster (who goes by the glorious self-chosen name of webgoblin!) replied: "Sorry mate - it wasn't me. It was Neil."
I was gobsmacked - I just didn't expect Neil to do the updates himself: with Bryan he always emails over the latest news or update and I post it on his behalf: but no - Neil prefers to do a lot of it himself and shares the task with his webgoblin.
So I am now desperate: how on earth do I get through to Neil Gaiman himself, himself and say "Oi! - Neil! - cough up this two grand you owe me!"
So I email Bryan and ask him to put me through to Neil as I really do not expect any email I send to get through Neil's email spam filters, and he does.
Neil then replies and he's like "What? - no - I never... - did I? - what happened? - did I? - oh hell!" - and then replies again and says "can you send me over any proof that this is genuine and not some kind of scam?" - and since that is perfectly reasonable (it's what I would do myself after all) I reply with all of the details: the screen grabs of the analytics showing the traffic spike, the code on his own site that showed the image source as being my site, the details of my hosting deal and the invoice for the £2k in excess bandwidth.
And almost immediately he comes back with "well shit! - really sorry about that: it's all my own fault - I've already paid the bill for you!"
I was just floored - I'd expected to have to keep pestering him for ages, but as soon as it was obviously due to something he'd done, he just 'fessed up and did the decent thing, like the absolutely kind, decent human he is.
And then I get an email from his webgloblin - the one I said earlier I was really glad I hadn't sworn at? - and he said "Mate: why the hell are you paying for private hosting? - I've got a server right here that I will set you up to host the Bryan Talbot site on for free! - get out of that shitty hosting deal you've got right now, and use mine instead!"
So that's how Neil Gaiman inadvertently cost me £2,000, was a total and utter gentlemen in it sorting out and why the Bryan Talbot fanpage gets free hosting from Neil's webgoblin!