Hi! I did not know about disabling image hotlinking before, so last month, I had about 27 GB of bandwidth used on my site! Anyways, now I know and have disabled it. I even renamed the folders of the offending pictures. In my latest visitors stats in cpanel 11, I still see hits on those pictures, with old folder name and in the 'size in bytes' section, I see some constant value for all the pictures...something like 5232 bytes. Is that normal? Is 5232 byte being used from my bandwidth still? Or should I relax, once the hotlink is disabled?
I suppose there still is a request for the content. The user will look for those images, and return not found. The not found request/reply still involves data and database transfer.
yes you still have the overhead of the file requests themselves, and also the error page throwen back, shouldn't realy mind, not that much you can do about bad file requests.
You can just redirect all non existing (error) pages to your home page and benifit from those visitors who were going no where