You are running out of traffic quota with your hosting provider but see no reason for that excessive use? then you might be a victim of hotlinking.
Hotlinking of images and flash objects is becoming an increasing problem for many webmasters and site owners, especially the rising popularity of social networking services, affecting business and personal sites to pay more for their bandwidth usage. This article discusses the hotlinking issue and some simple steps you can take to reduce the impact of this form of bandwidth theft – from Philippine Web Hosting Provider.
Hotlinking or bandwidth theft is when someone links directly to a file, images, and embedding it directly into a website. In other words, bandwidth leeching. An example would be using an <img> tag to display a JPEG image you found on someone else’s web page so it will appear on your own site, or when someone links directly to a file on your site and when the other website has visitors to the page containing that code, the image from your site would be displayed and the amount of data transferred would be your responsibility and stealing your prepaid traffic quota.
This is how you might display an image graphic file in the HTML on your own web page:
<img scr=”http://www.notmysite.com/not-my-image.jpg”>
i.e. the image is being displayed on the page, but another site is delivering the content.
Negative effects of hotlinking
Hotlinking can have a lot of undesirable consequences and effects, mainly:
- bandwidth usage is higher that you would expect it to be on your site. Because the image is being called from your server.
- images or flash objects being displayed where you don’t want them to be.
- loss of *real* traffic to your own site, i.e. instead of people needing to visit your web site to view the image or flash presentation, they can view it on the hotlinker’s site.
- Displaying an image or file that doesn’t belong to you could be a violation of copyright, making you open to litigation.
Every time the page is loaded through Hotlinking, the outside server has to use its bandwidth to display the image. To avoid this problem, don’t link to files on servers that don’t belong to you. To share images and files on your own web page, upload them to your own server’s directory or to a free image hosting service that allows direct linking.
Why hotlinking is Popular?
Most people hotlink for one or more of the following reasons:
a) hotlinking is easy.
b) They wanted to reduce their own bandwidth and hard disk usage so they won’t pay extra is a bad idea.
c) getting files or images that their own service doesn’t support.
d) they are just plain nasty
e) some people don’t know that hotlinking is bad mostly due to the social networking phenomenon.
Most webmasters aren’t able to detect hotlinking until it becomes a massive problem; such as sudden spikes in bandwidth usage without a corresponding increase in traffic and the best advice is prevention to avoid the problem.
Prevent Hotlinking:
The simplest solution is to use the following in your .htaccess file. It will just display an empty placeholder on the hotlinker’s page where the image should appear. You will need to change “you” and “.com” to reflect your domain name: which will check if the requests for your files are coming from inside your hosting server or from a different one and handle the situation accordingly.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?you\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|bmp|png|swf)$ – [F]
The code above will check from where the requests are coming and if they do not originate from your site, a 403 error page will be served. In the .htaccess file you can specify also other types of files, not just .gif or .jpg files, as seen in the example above.
Bandwidth is not free! Most websites have a limited amount of data transfer and the website owners either have to cough up extra money each month to pay the fees, or face shutting down, it is the primary reasons why many are hotlinking. If your site needs to serve images videos and music do the necessary protection to avoid hotlinking.
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