Bandwidth Theft
I just ran through some logs and discovered that people are stealing my bandwidth by hot-linking to my images. What is this? Instead of downloading images found on the web to use for your own purposes, which is dubious anyway, the criminal actually uses the URL to my site for the src in the img tag. This means that not only are they stealing the image, they are stealing bandwidth which I pay for.
Some people do this unaware that they are actually stealing, others do it to save their own bandwidth when their site gets busy. Either way, it is a real crappy thing to do. Its like running a secret wire from your neighbor’s house to run YOUR electric stuff. Which also happened to me!
My solution? The old switcheroo! If I find a image being linked from my site, I just replace that image on my server with something that the thief would not want on their site. Its kinda funny and it works to get them off your server.
The other option is to prevent “hotlinking” via .htaccess. This is fine, but its not nearly as fun! To all you bandwidth thieves.. enjoy the new pics!
