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You are going to ask yourself, how can you steal someone else's data transfer..? Unfortunately, easier than you think! Every time you provide a direct URL for any image on your site or any other website - you are transferring data from the remote server of the website, and by doing this - stealing his bandwidth.

If the website offers banner exchange, or awards, and gives a code that links to the image on his server - this means he is aware of the bandwidth which is getting wasted, but in exchange he gets the desired promotion for his website. However, not everyone will be happy with his promotion at the cost of his data transfer.

Let us imagine, that you have an animated banner, which weights 300kb, but you ask visitors that want to link to you - to store it on your server and not to link the image directly to you. And now let's image that someone, even out of good will to help you to promote your site - links the banner to your server, means the source of the image will not be his folder, but a direct URL to your hosting server. Assuming this 'someone' gets 100 visitors per day, each of them to view your banner, which will turn 300kb to 30,000kb (30 MB). Apply this to a calendar month, and you get 900,000 KB (900 MB) stolen from the bandwidth you have paid for. If, additionally to this, we will presume that a few people use your banner, or wallpaper or any other large images, not to mention software downloads or other multimedia that takes up a lion share of bandwidth - you might find your website offline soon, or been forced to upgrade to a bigger hosting plan and buy extra bandwidth.

How to protect yourself from this kind of theft? If your server supports "hot linking protection" you can simply block remote access to files, let's say, in your images folder. If you hosting service doesn't provide hot linking protection on the Control Panel, then the only thing you can do is sincerely ask not to link to you, and maybe even explain in a few words WHY are you against direct URL to your website, for those who basically do not understand the whole bandwidth stealing problem.

While we had an example of someone who does it unintentionally, this can as well be someone who does it on purpose. For example, if one pays for only 1GB data transfer and not wishing to pay more, or is even hosted on a free website, which disallows him to upload large images, he might - just in order to save his own bandwidth -- provide direct URL to your server, which will allow his visitors to download material at your cost by all means.

Let us imagine, that you have an animated banner, which weights 300kb, but you ask visitors that want to link to you - to store it on your server and not to link the image directly to you. And now let's image that someone, even out of good will to help you to promote your site - links the banner to your server, means the source of the image will not be his folder, but a direct URL to your hosting server. Assuming this 'someone' gets 100 visitors per day, each of them to view your banner, which will turn 300kb to 30,000kb (30 MB). Apply this to a calendar month, and you get 900,000 KB (900 MB) stolen from the bandwidth you have paid for. If, additionally to this, we will presume that a few people use your banner, or wallpaper or any other large images, not to mention software downloads or other multimedia that takes up a lion share of bandwidth - you might find your website offline soon, or been forced to upgrade to a bigger hosting plan and buy extra bandwidth.

How to protect yourself from this kind of theft? If your server supports "hot linking protection" you can simply block remote access to files, let's say, in your images folder. If you hosting service doesn't provide hot linking protection on the Control Panel, then the only thing you can do is sincerely ask not to link to you, and maybe even explain in a few words WHY are you against direct URL to your website, for those who basically do not understand the whole bandwidth stealing problem. While we had an example of someone who does it unintentionally, this can as well be someone who does it on purpose. For example, if one pays for only 1GB data transfer and not wishing to pay more, or is even hosted on a free website, which disallows him to upload large images, he might - just in order to save his own bandwidth - provide direct URL to your server, which will allow his visitors to download material at your cost by all means.

Summary: Bandwidth crumbles through your fingers only when someone begins to link download files, banners, awards, images, smileys, mp3, etc to your server. So, you are basically pay for visitors on someone else's website. If you have 10GB bandwidth, and use only 0.5GB per month, this should not bather you. However, if you are provided with 10Gb out of which 8-9 GB are getting used by your visitor monthly, you might consider blocking hot linking, just to make sure you website will not go down thanks to some malicious visitor. Article written by Lorelei