Evil Hosting Issue

My widget site is a bandwith hog

[thaedge]

After getting throttled on previous host, my new host is costing me headaches and $ due to some failures and not as good as I hoped service.

Problem is bandwidth. Site is under 100mb in size without a prob, but pending recent stats and how it ends up in the next refresh in SEs the site will maintain 30gb a month of bandwith.

Short of asking for hosting companies, does anyone know of ways to help stop other sites from leaching images and such or anything I can do to streamline?

Note: Other then logo and one main image, page is stylesheet and text and few very small images(4).

Any ideas would help.

- edge

[lorax]

Leeching images can be a big bandwidth hog - especially if the leech is popular site.

You can defend yourself by identifying the leech's IP and URL and then banning them using .htaccess. There are a few threads here on WebmasterWorld that discuss this. Do a search on htaccess and images and you should get some decent results to read through.

Try to identify what else is sucking up bandwidth. There are a variety of things that you can do to streamline your website. Most of it has to do with optimizing code, caching, and reduction of the use of images and other bandwidth hogs like movies.

A few searches should yield what you need.

[charlier]

You could also change your code to use your images under a different name and then replace your old files with some more suitable content :-).

[thaedge]

charlier - I dont quite get your comment on "more suitable content" nor do I know what or how to just switch image names like that. Can you explain further please.

- edge

[Marketing Guy]

You rename image.gif to image2.gif in most HTML Editors and it will rename all links to that file in each of your pages.

Then you create a new image called image.gif (no longer used by your site), that has the text, "this image was used without permission from www.yoursite.com - please visit us for the appropriate image".

Scott

[bakedjake]

We've done it one of two ways by checking the referrer:

mod_rewrite: Make sure the referring URL on the graphic request is your site. If not, serve up a 404 or a 1x1 graphic.

Code: You can do this easily in PHP/ASP, or anything else really. Just make all of your graphics requested from a dynmic file that serves the graphic when called, such as:

mysite.com/image.asp?id=whatever.jpg

And then disallow access to the actual directory that the images are contained in except for local script access.

[thaedge]

Marketing Guy - I have some 2000 images on my site (image gallery of widgets) part of bandwith problem I know. Would be hard to change names and such in DB and actual images.

bakedjake - I like that idea, never thought of that. Thanks alot, should help quite a bit.

- edge

[PatrickDeese]

You rename image.gif to image2.gif

It might be easier to put the "real" image files in a new directory that way you could do a global search & replace for images -> img or whatever, then you could easily create the "visit www.widget.com" icons in the "old" directory.

But you definitely should look into banning remote serving of the images with you htaccess.

[moltar]

Also you can revenge a hot linker.

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