Bandwidth protection

[Francois]

Hello all,

I run a cardshop and recently I have problems people linking my cards on their sites or on forums, it has been always this way but now it's getting out of hand and I have to pay a extra fee each month cause of the extra bandwidth.

I searched the net and I found a program to prevent this, unfortunally it only works on a unix server and I have a linux server :-(

Does anyone of you have a solution for this?

Basically I need something that will prevent people posting my images on their site or on a forum.

Any help is welcome :-)

Greetings,

Francois

[Arthur]

Hello Francois,

If you search these forums for "bandwidth stealing" or "stolen bandwidth" you'll find many posts on this topic plus some solutions to prevent linking to images based on the referrer. It is not a full-proof method, but it can help a lot.

For example;
http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10255&highlight=bandwidth+stolen

And Linux is a form of Unix, so the program you found may work.

--Arthur

[Francois]

Thanks Arthur!

I made a .htaccess file like this:

SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://www.cards4everybody.com/" local_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://cards4everybody.com/" local_ref=1
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^$" local_ref=1
<FilesMatch ".(gif|jpg)">
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from env=local_ref
</FilesMatch>

and it works great!

Is it possible to ad a line to this .htaccess that will show a image (that tells them they steal bandwidth)?

Greetings,

François