Woke up this morning to see that some heavily trafficked Japanese gay message board hotlinked 18 images from a site of mine.
I'm glad people are finding the site and what not... but the hotlinking sucked up in one morning about 25 gigs of bandwidth! Almost 500,000 hits!
So as a quick fix I just renamed the images and uploaded in the place of a couple a little file with the domain name of the site they hotlinked from and a message to please not hotlink.
But as a more long term fix, what all have you guys incorporated to try and cut down on hotlinking like that? Any simple techniques that don't require major site overhaul?
The hotlinking that's taken place before this morning never bothered me as the bandwidth it used up was minimal.
But the board from this morning wreaked havoc on my bandwidth like Godzilla through Tokyo (eh... sorry... I can just hardly get through a Japan reference without bringing up Godzilla).