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Posted By:
gyutae
187 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.davidairey.com)
Category: Other Online Marketing
Lately I’ve been finding more and more bloggers lifting images directly from my server and using them on their own blogs / websites. Not only is this stealing, but it’s also using up the bandwidth you’re paying your web host for.
4 Comments
Comments
I caught someone hotlinking a JavaScript file a few months ago!
The site now prevents holinking to anything except HTML files.
There is a negative side to not allowing it - people like the extra traffic possible from Stumbleupon and if you prevent hotlinking, the images can't be used.
Then you should look at Icanhascheezeburger - the success of the site is because everyone hotlinks their images - they have made it as easy as possible to hotlink, but with attribution.
How are photo and video sites popular? By hotlinking and viral content that in some way draws people back to the site.
With .htaccess it is very easy to set up an exception to allow particular sites to hotlink.
It is just one line of code, per site that you want to allow.
These days there are too many exceptions you need to make
As you will see from the comments, it seems Bloglines doesn't cache images, and it could be the same for other feed readers.
WebproNews syndicate my content with permission. I don't think they hotlink to images, but if they did, it is not something I would worry about.
Some things I would worry about would be if I had the problem Lee from Toprank had with one of his viral widgets pulling in images from his server - it got too polular and the bandwidth / server load was becoming a problem, so they introduced a new version, and the old version they added huge icons.
In such a situation I would be more inclined to find a way to host the content cheaper or free, and use a redirect to the new location for the image.
A classic example would be "how much is your blog worth" - the image is hosted on Flickr - the only problem is that the code doesn't update over time, just like many of the follow on widgets people use