I will explain here what HOTLINKING, aka BANDWIDTH THEFT, is and what you can do about it. If you have a website, you need to read this and check out the links provided. People who HOTLINK to your graphics, etc are BANDWIDTH THIEVES. This practice is illegal and can cost you quite a bit of money and time down of your site. The links provided here will open in a new window.

Is your website going through more and more used up bandwidth and you just don't understand why? Well you may want to check out your site's server logs. The server stores visitor information in files with the .log extension - open them as text files if you want to look at the raw log data. Most of the time you will be provided with information such as:

Name of the computer requesting the Web page,
Date and time of the request,
URL of the file requested. This is noted exactly as the user requested it,
Error or status code generated by the request,
Size (in bytes) of the document returned to the client,
The URL the visitor came from immediately before they requested the file,
A record of the visitor's browser and operating system.

If your Web host doesn't offer site statistics - or charges you for them - check out some of the Web site analysis packages available for download. The CounterGuide.com Web site lists 20 packages with short reviews and product links. Packages vary widely in price and performance. Several like Analog, http-Analyze, and RealTracker are free for non-commercial sites. OR you can simply change hosts, for one that does offer such files, of which I did.

Bandwidth theft ("hotlinking") is when someone else makes their website using your space, images, sounds, videos, etc. Hotlink bandwidth theft, hotlinking, file leeching, bandwidth bandits, hot links, bandwidth leeching, hotlinks, external linking, remote linking, deep linking and direct linking are all words and phrases used to describe this single problem faced by many webmasters.

The result of hotlinking is that the offending site is able to present it's pages without paying for the bandwidth needed to serve up the stolen content. "Well isn't THAT nice of them??!!" The victim site ends up paying the bandwidth expense for serving up the files without gaining any page views. If you have your site up at one of the free hosting sites such as Tripod, Geocities etc, you're site will go down when you reach the small limit they allow you.

My site was (and they are still attempting) a victim of BANDWIDTH THEFT by the thieves at BlackPlanet and MiGente. They are STILL doing it even after notifying not only the websites authors but their hosting company, Community Connect, Inc. The authors wrote back with some mighty nasty words and their lovely hosting company more of less told me, "Tuff $h!t." It didn't start until after my site was listed on the SomethingAwful site with a ridiculous review. The site and guestbook was spammed like you wouldn't believe. Beware of this jerk a$$ed webdope and his mighty dysfunctional, moronic followers who do his dirty work for him. You can read more about these sites on my "WARNING" page.

It seems a good number of times the links to my graphics were left there in the guestbooks of the authors visitors.

There are a few things you can do to either stop bandwidth theft or at least cause the thief embarrassment so much so that they will happily stop.

You could contact the site. First, nicely ask the offending webmaster to remove the unauthorized link. The person may be a newbie and not realize that it's a problem. Mention that the material on your site is copyrighted and he/she needs your approval to display your work on the site. Many people mistakenly believe that anything on the Internet is free for the taking.

If that doesn't work, contact the offender's Web host. If the webmaster ignores your request, contact his Web hosting company. Direct linking is usually a violation of the host's Terms of Service agreement and may get the site shut down ... BUT that doesn't always work either such as my case with Community Connect, Inc.

You could do what I did when I moved my site to my new host. Modify your HTACCESS file to refuse requests from external sites. Your site will still be accessible to visitors, but other sites won't be able to request individual files and display them. This article in TheSiteWizard.com explains how it works.

If you're nervous about playing around with your HTACCESS file, there's still an easy way to combat the problem. Just change the name of the file that's being stolen! You'll cause broken links on the sites that tried to steal it. That doesn't always work either because they can simply revisit your site to get the new file name AND it will still use up a bit of your bandwidth in order to produce the ERROR page..

Lastly, you can do a search on BANDWIDTH THEFT and find out more on the subject but what I have here is basically what you'll find.

© Rickie Lee, 2003

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