For the two weeks (or maybe more, just been really bad the last two weeks) it seemed like UltraMookie slowed to a crawl. I did some investigation today and found out exactly what was happening and how to correct it. On the Internet everything is shared. If you have a cool image on your website, it can be taken and used without having to ask you. And a worse thing for this is if the image is taken from you while it still sits on your server -- basically the person not only leeches the image from you but also steals the bandwidth to show that image too. This was exactly what was happening to UltraMookie.Com.
A few individuals (one on some adult access site) decided that some of the images here on UltraMookie.com (like Zaskar's kick ass animated Elmo picture located here) were damn cool and decided to use them with just an img src link instead of taking the image and putting it on their own server to use their own bandwidth. Ugh, what arse-holes. Because of this the bandwidth usage per day here at UltraMookie skyrocketed from the usual under-30MB/day to close to 90MB/day! Those leeches were making UltraMookie use up three times the usual bandwidth!
Now since I didn't want to destroy Zaskar's page by removing the Elmo picture (or any other pages which had images that were being leeched) I found a way (thank goodness for Google!) to have Apache block this sort of leeching. And the technique is rather easy! You can read Ken Coar's very helpful article on how to do this HERE. With just doing that, the responsiveness of UltraMookie.com has returned.
Take that you damn image and bandwidth leeches!