While having a bit of a browse through the statistics for my websites I happened to noticed some referrals coming from other sites. After some browsing I noticed that there was at least one site that has hotlinked to my piccies on my server for totallylesmills.
This is one of my pet hates. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t pretend to own the copyright to the images or anything, but hotlinking is stealing MY bandwidth. For those who aren’t sure what hotlinking is, let me explain. When we create a website using your own host, such as I have here and with all my other sites, I pay for server space and I get allocated a certain amount of bandwidth (downloads). If someone was to download a picture and then upload it to their own site, then so be it. However hotlinking refers to actually linking to and displaying the image while it’s still hosted on my server. What this means is that when someone browses that page it uses the bandwidth on my server, without me ever getting credit for my site.
Now I actually have tons of bandwidth, but that’s not the point. Hotlinking is considered incredibly rude.
So what I have done is created a .htaccess file, restricting the access to my images, meaning you can hotlink no more. Like I said……it’s just one of my little pet hates. So I like to educate people on good netiquette and to NEVER HOTLINK!
There, I feel better now 😉