I am writing this post so that others may learn from my mistake. They say hindsight is 20-20 and looking back at it now (only hours after the problem is fixed), I realize I should have known better. I'm a big fan of the google personalized homepage (http://www.google.com/ig. About a year ago, I wanted to add a customized weather icon to my page but could not find a Google widget that would display the latest weather for my city. (In New Brunswick, Canada) I asked a friend if he could make such a widget, one that would always give me the updated weather info. He did this for me and it worked GREAT. We submitted to the Google gadget directory for others to use and didn't really think much about it. The gadget itself is at: www.BWebCentral.com/weathergg.xml To ensure that the weather was always up to date the gadget used 'meta-refresh' tag to refresh the display every 15 minutes or so. Perhaps, you can already see where this is going. So off we went, using the gadget on our pesonalized Google pages without a care in the world. Then yesterday at 2:05pm my website stopped working. Users visiting the page got a 403 Permission Denied' Error. So I contacted our web hosting provider to find out what was going on. It took a few emails before I finally received a message similar to the following Please keep in mind, that at this point, I had no idea what they were talking about and I sent a somewhat 'snooty' reply telling asking them "How can I resolve my problem, if I can't access the site to FIX my problem !!" I went for a walk to cool off a bit and while walking around, searching my mind about what the cryptic message from my web hosting provider could possibly mean. Then it dawned on me (which maybe anti-climatic by now). If only 200 people had the gadget on their pages, and the gadget kept refreshing from the server every 15 mintues..that would be like 3000 page hits in a 15 minute timeframe. That's like 19,200 hits/day. WOW what if more then 200 people were using the gadget ! The gadget is fixed now it doesn't refresh (though someday I hope to make it work a bit better). To add insult to injury, while it was being fixed I learned that the gadget didn't even have a proper link to the bwebcentral.com website. Google gadgets let you define an 'author' page in the title bar, and we spelled it wrong something like 'bwebcenntral.com' Some inspirational person registered this domain name in Dec 2006 and has probably been getting lots of hits to this page (which is full of ads and pop-ups and stuff) So, as I started this post, I am sharing my rather stupid and embarrassing mistake in the hope it will help others avoid a similar mistake as mine. So, please be VERY careful using things like META REFRESH, or similar mechanisms, and consider the resource load that might be impacted if designing something for the web community. In conclusion, I sincerely apologize to a) my website provider who I was somewhat 'rude to' at first ; b) theweathernetwork.com who I'm sure whose site was also getting a lot of hits because of my "smart idea" and c) the users of my Google gadget, some of whom I've probably lost due to my near 24 hour outage. If you are one of these people please pass this on to others who may not read this forum but maybe wondering 'what happened'. Oh and sorry to (d), people whom I'm sure are smarter than I am and already knew about this but had to read through this entire post anyway only to think "Well..Duh !" Tks. JP Russell