Hotlinking Horrors

Written by Brad Traversy | 04 August 2010

With social networking services on an all time high, webmasters and web site owners are seeing hotlinking as a major and upcoming threat to their work. Hotlinking, also known as inline linking or Bandwidth theft implies direct linking to a web site’s files like images, videos etc. In other words, it means displaying a file on a page that is stored on another site. This might prove to be a very useful technique but more than often, people do so without the permission of the owner of the site that is being referenced. In case of illegal hotlinking, besides being a copyright issue, it is also a case of bandwidth theft since the object is being called from the server of origin and that account has to particularly bear the bandwidth expense for delivering the image for display. This unauthorized method is most common in sites which involve many images and videos.

Illegal hotlinking has some major downbeat effects. For one, there is increased bandwidth usage of your website and as the image is being delivered from your website, you will have to alone wear the expenses. Secondly, random images and flashes are displayed at places where you wouldn’t want them to be. Also, you tend to lose the ‘actual’ traffic to your own web site. People can now visit the hotlinker’s web site for the images they wanted to see on your web site. People generally engage in hotlinking because of the ease with which this process allows them to reduce their hard disk usage and bandwidth. It could also be done to display images that the hotlinker’s service doesn’t support. Mostly, hotlinkers are unaware of the fact that the entire process is illegal and openly become a part of it. And if you don’t have the permission, any kind of remote linking to a media or program file is equivalent to theft!

Hotlinking is usually difficult to detect unless it becomes a major problem. It is any day better to protect your site from it instead of trying to track the hot linkers. One of the simple methods is using .htaccess as a protection. It is a set of instructions stored in your web site’s file base that the server reads before delivering the submitted content and hence filters out the unwanted content. This will purely depend on the fact that the level of filtration will be determined by the location of the .htaccess file containing the instruction in your file base. You can adopt a basic hotlinker protection plan or an advanced one. These methods ensure quite a large degree of protection from hotlinkers. If you are looking to protect yourself from bandwidth wastage or if you want to save yourself the millions of hours that you spend dealing with these hotlinkers and if you want to keep a loyal and large customer base, it is advisable that you immediately take the aforementioned steps. Hotlinking is indeed a major threat to the webmasters of today!