Save Your Bandwidth – Prevent Unwanted Image Download from Your Site

Do you use pictures on your posts? Do you often losing up bandwidth but you know you didn’t use that much? If so, you may want to know that sometimes people find your picture interesting and they use them on their blog/site. You can say “It’s OK, the picture is not copyrighted and anybody can use it”. However, I don’t speak in the name of copyright issues here.

When we use graphics, we tell the browser where to take the the picture using <img src=”imagesource” />. When some people put your image link in their tag, it reads like <img src=”take the picture from his server” />, and you know what that means? That’s right! Someone else’s using your bandwidth!

And if for long you’ve been wondering what has been eating up your quota, you may want to fix this issue. Sometimes, people have done it without realising that it is inflicting some loss at your side, so don’t be that furious . I admit that in the beginning of my blogging, I did such thing once or twice. I thought it was a small picture and didn’t cause any loss to the other side. :p

Anyway, if you want to do something to prevent your bandwidth wasted, you could do a little modification on your .htaccess file. These tips I found on thesitewizard.com and david airey’s post.

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “^http://www.your-domain-name-here.com/” locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “^http://www.your-domain-name-here.com$” locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “^http://your-domain-name-here.com/” locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “^http://your-domain-name-here.com$” locally_linked=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer “^$” locally_linked=1
<FilesMatch “\.(gif|png|jpe?g)$”>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=locally_linked
</FilesMatch>

Change “your-domain-name-here.com” to your own. And also do not correct the spelling “Referer” (with only one “r” in the middle of the word). It is the word that needs to go into the .htaccess file – do not change it to “Referrer”. More information on the code is on the links above the code.

Or you can alternatively use something like this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]

You need to create a custom image titled nohotlink.jpe, and upload it to your /image/ folder. Notice the file extension .jpe – this is because .jpeg and .jpg files are now blocked from appearing on third party websites, but this exception allows you to show your custom image. What custom images you can put there? Get your ideas referring to David’s post.

If you concern that doing so will eat up your bandwidth, I recommend a HostMonster hosting service. Currently they cater 15,000 Gigs of Bandwidth Transfer and 1,500 Gigabytes of Hosting Space with only $6.95 per month. There’s no worry about exceeding bandwidth quota anymore! I’ve been with them for more than a year and never had issues and for that 1 year time I only had about 5 hours of downtime. Check them out!

Finally, how did you yourself source images in your site? Did you outsource them to other webmaster’s server? Now that you know it is kinda Dr.Evil.., let’s use our own server from now on.

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