Preventing bandwidth theft

I was just looking through the log files for my website and ran a quick command (below) to check out any 404s my site is sending back.

I spotted a few referrers pointing to an image I had uploaded a while back and thought I’d check them out. Most of the referrers were coming from Indian domains and I even had one from a site called downloadbazar with a half decent TLD! Basically they were stealing my bandwidth by using an image hosted on my server to make their own content look better! Obviously the only reason I spotted this was because the image they were looking for has been removed from my server but are they having a giraffe? Pff.. that won’t carry on I thought so…

…a quick google unearthed this really quick simple and well explained guide on thesitewizard.com how to stop such theft using a few lines of code in .htaccess

Now, back to checking the rest of these 404 errors :\

-Lewis