Esther C Kane

Experimenting here, if I wanted to steal some bandwidth from a website – actually, I suppose my goal would REALLY be to steal the image but not only is it bad enough that I steal the image but the way that I do it, I may compound the bad karma by stealing bandwidth as well.

Usually, when you post an image online it’s something to a local file.  But if you post it directly from the website it came from, like this…

http://www.mauslawfirm.com/images/ad-home.jpg

Then you are stealing bandwidth.

So, as a responsible website owner, webmaster, designer, whatever – what do you do?  Easy.  You enter the following code into your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/stop_stealing_bandwidth.jpe [L]

Create an image and name it stop_stealing_bandwidth.jpe

So, that’s the story on saving bandwidth!