htaccess | Hotlink Protection

Bandwidth theft or "hotlinking" is the direct linking to a website's files (images, video, etc.) without permission. This can be costly to you if you are not aware of such theft and bandwidth is expensive and no one should be able to hotlink your copyrighted images unless you allow them to do so.

Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred from a website to a user's computer. When you view a webpage, you are using that site's data transfer to display the their website or files on their server. Web hosts charges are based on the amount of data transferred per month and if your site is over it's monthly bandwidth, it's billed for the extra data per GB which runs $1.50 to $3.00 per GB you are over with your allowed bandwidth and if you have a few dozen people hotlinking your images it will cost you.

It's against the law to hotlink and if you find someone hotlinking your images you should do a "whois" and find out who their host is and contact them and most cases the host will contact the hotlinker and put a stop to it asap and some times even remove their account if they don't comply.

The way to protect your images at your site is with .htaccess file with the below lines.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !http://www.yourdomaingoeshere.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !http://yourdomaingoeshere.com
RewriteRule [^/]+\.(gif|jpg) http://www.yourdomaingoeshere.com/index.html

This will break all hotlinked images that are not on your server or host server that you have not allowed to do so.

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