HELP! I need help with hotlinking

Hi,
My bandwidth usage has skyrocketed recently and I am getting threatening emails from my hosting company. I haven't seen any significant spike in my traffic, so I looked through the log and found out there are tons of chinese websites hotlinking to my images. I want to block them using the following code in my htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?badsite\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://mysite.com/dont-hotlink-me.gif [L]

But my problem is there are a ton of sites hotlinking to my site. I can block all sites with RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$, but I don't want to block friendly sites and there are a lot of them too. The good thing is that all these sites have similar name such as "http://www.badsite1.com", http://www.badsite2.com etc. Is there a command in the htaccess where I can block sites with similar names (i.e. all sites that start with http://www.bad... or http://bad...")

Thanks you in advance.


Regards,
Mike

 

If you use cPanel you can easily do it by adding friendly sites' url to the "allow access" section.

 

Thanks for the reply Sylver. I host with godaggy, and I don't think they offer cPanel

 

Try to install website firewall script.