What I Think » hot linking http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink Yes. I'm back. Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:23:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Using .htaccess to Prevent Hot Linking http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink/2008/01/25/using-htaccess-to-prevent-hot-linking/ http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink/2008/01/25/using-htaccess-to-prevent-hot-linking/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:43:32 +0000 Paul http://www.paulmc.org/whatithink/2008/01/25/using-htaccess-to-prevent-hot-linking/ Hot linking is when another website embeds an image from your website in theirs by directly linking to the image. It’s considered bad form, as every time the image is requested by a browser it’s your bandwidth being used, and bandwidth costs money.

The good news is that you can prevent hot linking by adding the following lines to your .htaccess file:

<IfModule rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]
</IfModule>

Thanks to altlab for the .htaccess rewrite rules.

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