A List Apart: Articles: Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention
A List Apart: Articles: Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention: "Hey! That’s mine!

Most web professionals are all too aware of the problems caused by hotlinkers. Leechers. Bandwidth thieves. People who use images hosted on your web server on their own pages.

For some lucky people who don’t pay by the gigabyte for the amount of data they transfer, that's not too big a deal. Who cares if some little-trafficked weblog uses your photograph of snow falling in New York?

For other sites, however, it's a much bigger problem. If a 100K JPEG is hotlinked on a site that gets, say, 1,000 hits a day, that’s 100MB of data transferred from your site without a single person actually visiting your site. If you have only a few gigabytes of transfer available per month — or worse, pay money per gigabyte — this can add up. And if someone were to leech an entire gallery from your site …

The trouble is that the usual approaches for preventing hotlinking have a couple of side effects."
- posted by Gp @ 1:45 PM