How To Prevent Bandwidth Theft And Hotlinking

If your website contains images, music or video files etc you may be at risk of bandwidth theft or “hotlinking”. An example of hotlinking is when someone places say an <img> tag on their webpage linking directly to an image on your site. When a visitor downloads this particular page they will be using YOUR bandwidth to display YOUR image on THEIR SITE.

Since you are paying your web host for bandwidth and the fact that in some cases your host may take your site off line if you exceed your monthly data transfer allocation, you should treat bandwidth theft very seriously.

Hotlinking to your files can be prevented by configuration of your .htaccess file. Alternatively, cPanel and Plesk web hosting control panels have a hotlink protection feature. Here you can specify the file extensions (.jpg .png etc) you wish to protect from hotlinking and the domain names of sites permitted to link to these file types.

This article can be found at: www.getontheinternet.net/webmaster-tips/hot-linking/index.shtml

[Updated - 29 March 2007]

Copyright © 2007 David Kaye – All rights reserved.
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