Yesterday I was looking at the traffic on www.shwetagupta.com and found that lot of people from myspace and other domains are referring to images hosted on my server and hence eating up my bandwidth. I was getting 40% of the requests(for images) from myspace domain. Yes! they have a huge traffic. If one has to use the images then they should download them and host them on their server instead of hotlinking to someone else site. “Hotlinking” or “Bandwidth theft” is direct linking to a web site’s files (images, video, etc.). An example would be using an <img> tag to display an image you found on someone else’s web page so it will appear on your own site, weblog, forum message post, etc. Usually personal sites don’t have that much of bandwidth to allow hotlinking of images. Also I observed that lot of people these days not only copy the content from your site but also the the images (still being served from your server i.e. leeching your bandwidth)
You can do two things to discourage hotlinking of content on your site
I Making changes in .htaccess file
Suppose all your images are in images folders ( mine are in http://www.shwetagupta.com/blog/images) then create .htaccess file in that folder with following content so that request for any image on shwetagupta.com (on any domain other than shwetagupta.com) will cause it to display a substitute image (stolen.jpg) i.e
” .
. I got used to everything like traffic, climate , system but not to the professional world here. I had pretty bad experiences with the companies here during interview process itself. I had offers from IBM, Google , 