If people start hotlinking images that you host, it ends up costing you bandwidth for no gain for you, however, its really easy to defeat this for most users using a htaccess file in your sites root.

You could place it in the images folder only, this would limit hotlinking to images only then. There are 2 ways of disabling images, the less nice way which gives a 403 error (access forbidden) - this way the users will see a red 'x' or the image will be hidden by the browser. Or the nicer way, showing an alternative image instead that discourages hotlinking.



This will disable hotlinking for gif, jpg, png and ico type files and show a red 'x'. For this to work, you will need to replace site.com with your domain name.



The difference with this version, is that it will show the user an alternative image rather than the one they asked.

It is a very easy way to save yourself bandwidth if you get someone stealing one (or more) of your images.