Bandwidth usage can escalate to extremes if a few people get their hands on graphics, videos and sound files that can be directly linked from your server/website. For example - somebody really likes an image on your website and instead of asking for permission, downloading the image and linking to it on their own site, they just copy the URL that leads to the image on your website and stick the code directly into their website. This way, they use your bandwidth for free, and you get to be hounded by your isp and charged extra when your image becomes popular with a large group of people, such as a community of copycats on myspace who don’t know any better.

The solution is surprisingly easy. The addition of a .htaccess file in the top level of your site, or the addition of a few lines in your current .htaccess file will fix things up for you.

The following is what I have in the .htaccess file to protect the site from having others directly link to content that I don’t want them directly linking to:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|mpg|mpeg|png)$ - [F]

I’m not sure what the procedure is for every system, but the above will work for Apache servers. NOTE: you can put any file type in the Rewrite rule line. Just separate each file extension with a |

The above graph is for the first few days of September, 2006. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd of the month show the bandwidth usage before the addition of changes to the .htaccess file. The 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th are after the changes. The previous month showed monthly bandwidth usage at over 40 gigabytes - for a personal website site is basically a blog.

I used this article at selfseo.com for my solution.
For more information on .htaccess files and what you can do with them, check out the Wikipedia entry on .htaccess.

Posted by allen on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 8:40 pm.