I am thinking I will just replace all referred images with the attached hotlink file I made tonight…
[edit: See below for two alternates i may use! give me opinions!
erisian02-10-12
I do not make money on this site, so I have to monitor and address these things so I do not end up with account overages and such..
After analysis, I have found that around 25% of all bandwidth (in the last 6 months) on my domain goes directly to hotlinking by other sites. Normally this is not an issue, but in the case of a couple sites, i am providing the same images (or multiple) up to 6000 times in a 30 day period.
To combat, lately I have been overlaying all referred images with obvious and imposing (but not debilitating, and no impact on direct users) watermarks, this was the best choice so far but did nothing to slow usage, in fact numbers went up..
Just a general poll to readers/bloggers:
How do you personally handle hotlinking/bandwidth leeching?
Help me by sharing your experiences/solutions!
If I see a downward trend, I can always revert this, but I don’t see that happening soon…
Its either I do something lame like this or start considering adverts, which I hate worse…
Alternates:
Personally, I hotlink to every image you have. I wrote a bot to troll your page and link them out to Reddit, Fark, Digg, and Facebook.
ALL YOUR BANDWIDTH BELONG TO US.
Serious Mongo thinks your plan of a water mark is elegant and acceptable. It might drive legitimate traffic as well.