How to stop bandwidth theft?

Hi,

I have a website that consumes over 1.5 TB a month. I always find new people hot linking to my files and they eat my bandwdth very quickly.

How does websites like megaupload and rapidshare.de protect their links?
Can anyone help?

 

What's your website?

 

1. Tell Google Image Bot to F off in your robots file.

2. Read this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking/

If you offer downloads, implement some referer checking mechanism to redirect them.

 

mihaidamianov: the website is not in english so not use of knowing the url.
T0PS3O: Thanks a lot. But do you have any idea of how to make urls like the ones in megaupload?

 

Never heard of megaupload.

 

as a long term solution, you should have dynamic images and dynamic downloads, so it's changed for every visitors so nobody can hotlink to specific item but to the pages only.

In php, you can do something like this <img src="myimages.php?imageID=123&rand=kjdiukj39">, the rand would changed with every new request because it would be something random that you can verify on the server

 

There are also ways to prevent hotlinking using htaccess.

Check These Out:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/hotlinking
http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html

 

if you are hosted on IIS or are willing to change to IIS, COLDLINK
will do the trick nicely. there is a hotlink testing tool available on the site.

just search for the name.

 

1. check referrer
2. embed encrypted timecode in urls so it will expire in say 10 minutes

 

yup it's easy using the htaccess try this generator:

http://www.htmlbasix.com/disablehotlinking.shtml

 

Thanks a lot guys.

How do you do that?

 

Sessions on php

try php.net

 

I will do. Thanks a lot

 

I am very courios what is your website.
how many visitators do you have?

 

Maybe you try to PM him that question...most user dont define specific site here

 

>> embed encrypted timecode in urls so it will expire in say 10 minutes

> Sessions on php

Sessions will work for less-loaded servers, actually I have solution without sessions, initially built for video downloads site. Most of videoplayers do not send referrer / nor support cookies and it's quite tricky to prevent hotlinking in this particular case. I cant disclose more details for obviuos reasons.

 

Don't want to sound rude or something but check these results.
I'm sure a lot of usefull information can be retrieved from it

 

Right EDZ the Big Brother Google!

 

do u have cpanel it has hotlinking prevention straight up?

 

unfortunately i don't. But i guess it will use htaccess to do that. Am i right?