Hotlinking is Stealing!
Most people with websites like to check on website statistics to see which pages or images are popular with viewers
Several months ago, while checking my web statistics, I noticed a major increase in requests for a certain image on Martha's Web. The requests were coming from several pages for users on Xanga.com. Since my web statistics program gave me the web addresses I checked out the sites to discover to my disbelief, three users were using an image from my site as a background image! They didn't bother to copy the image and save it. They could have saved it to their computers and then uploaded the image to their sites. But no, they just copied and pasted the image into their site and in so doing, they pasted in code which caused the image to remain on my site. Now, every time someone visited their site, there was a 'call' to the image still on my site.
This practice is known as 'hotlinking' and is also known as 'bandwidth theft'. This practice is 'stealing' from webmasters as there are a lot of website spaces that are limited in the amount of space users can have and some hosts charge the website owners for excessive bandwidth. Some unscrupulous hosts encourage this practice by their users so they can have more 'images' visible on the pages. One of these hosts is Xanga.com. If someone on Xanga starts hotlinking to an image on someone else's site, it does no good to complain to Xanga.
Xanga even has this disclaimer on their help pages explaining bandwidth:,
Please note that if your image is hosted on another site,
it's not Xanga's fault when that image stops working. :-)
Xanga's page explaining bandwidth and remote blocking Notice they don't say users shouldn't do it!
I decided I couldn't let these users get away with this so I created a really ugly (and I do mean UGLY) file and replaced the hotlinked file on my site, using the same path and file name. I change the name of the original file so legitimate viewers could still see the image. But that didn't deter them, they just came back and found the renamed image! So I had to rename the file again and saved it using the same path and file name. This time they took the hint and left my image alone.
I tried blocking Xanga from my site, but this kept some legitimate users from accessing Martha's Web, so I 'unblocked' Xanga. (This method, using a file named .HTAccess, is touted by a lot of websites tell folks how to 'stop hotlinking', but I found it really isn't a good method to use.) Not all Xanga users are hotlinking, there are some really good sites on Xanga. It is too bad that a few users can give an entire domain a bad name.
Then I discovered another site, not a Xanga site, was hotlinking to a file on my site so I decided to get a little free traffic and replaced the file with a link.
I still get a few hits on this one, I can only assume the perpetrator hasn't noticed the change!
But Xanga is not the worst site for allowing hotlinking and bandwidth theft, not by far! The really bad site for allowing this is a online journal site, MySpace, used mainly by teenagers and young people. Most of them (not all) have NO idea about how to make a web page and have no desire to learn. A Google search on MySpace brings up a lot of pages with comments about MySpace, but I didn't see any about hotlinking.