I have an image hosting site , will it be fine to protect hotlinks ? It is my 1st experience in image hosting sites , Well a kind person can help me? I only need to enable hotlinks protection , i would like to know how to enable this function? Best Regards
If the image host in new then donot enable hotlink protection. People will put the images on their websites and it will promote your image hosting. You can block some websites at a later stage who use a lot of your bandwidth. I've seen many image hosts doing do.
Simply store your thumbnails in a different folder to the main sized images. Use .htaccess to block images from the main folder from being hotlinked (search for "hotlinking protection" to see examples). The reason for not protecting the thumbnails is to allow people to embed thumbs which link to the main image on your site with the codes that you will provide.