How do I prevent Leeching or Hot linking

i have a site and its hurting my paid for bandwidth so i need some code

[pyromancy]

how do i prevent hotlinking or leeching? php is preferred but anything that works will be greatly appreciated

[coconutz]

Hi pyromancy, Welcome to Webmasterworld. [webmasterworld.com] Here's an earlier discussion that you may find helpful:

Need to know how to stop direct linking [webmasterworld.com]

You can always try the Site Search [searchengineworld.com] if you need to try to find some more information.

[kevinpate]

I had a minor problem with this a while back.
Someone even greener than I was took over a site for
the local branch of the same NFP that I maintain a
site for.

The wb lifted chunks of our content and worked them up for the other site. I suppose that what with imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all, it was no big
deal. The down side was since the chap was even greener than moi, he hadn't worked all the images into that site's server, thus certain calls were tagging into our bandwidth.
it wasn't a major ding, but we operate on low reserves and thus try to avoid such needless dings.

I simply changed the name of the file on my end and put up with the error messages in the logs. I also finally found an addy that was useful and contacted the person to explain how to fix things on their end. All ended well.

Now if it were my personal site and someone was just being tacky, well, as Forrest's mamma always says ... tacky is as tacky does, and I probably wouldn't have resisted thenurge to have a wee bit o fun with it first.

Good luck and happy holidays

[Muskie]

cPanel for instances has ways of defeating this easily. It hasn't shown up in my little hobby site. But people leech off our server at work, I pointed this out to the powers that be, but the bandwidth involved is minimal and this is a low priority in the grand scheme of things.

Your webhost may have a quick painless solution. But I too like the rename files and provide creative alternatives for the leechers... ;-)

Muskie

[DrCool]

One of our clients had a site where people were leeching off images. They were linking directly to the images on our customers site rather than using their own images. What we did was rename the image on his site and replaced the old one with an image that said something to the effect of "Don't buy from this site. They are thieves. Buy from xxxxx.com instead" and it worked well.

I don't know of any technical solutions but that one worked well.

[Dynotech]

Hello,

First time poster here. Get resource. Wish I found it sooner.

I had issues with leeching images and but mainly my zip files that I offer for free. My site is a small game site and when I used the alternate image I was glad it wasn't anything too 'creative' as I burned a few memebers who use the site for their tags they use on BBS's. Whoops!

I made a few directories 'leechable' to resolve this.

Dyno