Image Hosting & bandwidth theft

[cyrus]

Has anyone used an image hosting service?

As the web-heads may know, one of the problems of having images on your site is bandwidth theft and hotlinking - in other words, other websites who not only use your images without authorization, they use the image while it is still stored on your web hosting service's hard drives rather than downloading a copy of the image and the uploading the copy onto their own web hosting service's hard drives.

So, as a result, some of the "hits" on your site (instances in which people had viewed your images) are actually occurring when visitors are viewong your images on someone else's web site - but you have to pay for the bandwidth that's being used up to serve up those images.

I have heard that there are outfits which will host your images for you in exchange for ad space on yuor site, so even if there's no real way to avoid the problem of bandwidth theft, then at least you're not paying for the bandwidth that's being consumed by the thief.

One such service is Allyoucanupload.com

I don't know much about this & I assume that the webmaster-type forums can perhaps answer my queries, but since I assume a lot of photographers have most-images sites, was curious if anyone has encountered this problem, and has considered/used this solution?

[resummerfield]

I’m new to this, but I was talking about this yesterday with my site host, and they said I could place a file called .htaccess in my Apache site root directory to prevent hotlinking. See this site…http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html.

[Greg Miller]

I use traditional hosts so I cannot answer your question directly. Most traditional hosts provide reporting such as WebTrends. These reports generally include a page or more that detail how people get to your site (or an image on your site) - this is good to know anyway. Anybody sending significant volume to your site by a link to an image will be very evident on this report. A quick email to the "linker" is generally enough to get them to stop. I have caught several bloggers that put a link to one of my images in their blog text by looking at my WebTrends report.

Most traditional hosts also provide an option to stop providing bandwidth if you are near to exceeding the amount that comes free with your account (this sucks because your site is down until the next month but at least you are not at risk of running up a huge bill).

If you watermark your images with your web site URL then you at least get lots of free advertising if a high volume site hijacks your images.

[cyrus]

htacess works in many cases, as does IP banning etc but the hackers have ways around it - I don't think this is as much of a concern for the usual photography website though. Anyway another benefit of the image hosting systems is that they keep your bandwidth usage down even if you don't have a problem with theft. I guess its not much of a problem for most people though.

[Bill_1856]

I have no idea what any of this thread is about!

[tim atherton]

people complaining about hotlinking always seems like a lot of whining imo - if you don't want hotlinks to your images, don't put them on the internet.

It means people are seeing your photographs - which presumably is the reason you put them up? If not, see point 1 again....

[darr]

I’m new to this, but I was talking about this yesterday with my site host, and they said I could place a file called .htaccess in my Apache site root directory to prevent hotlinking. See this site…http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html.

I use a similar technique that seems to work well. This is the link that appears for all images (except category thumbs) on the site:

http://photoscapes.com/cgi-bin/store/imageLeech.cgi?

[400d]

Add a big fat ugly watermark then.
But, seriously how much BW are you losing from hotlinking?!
I have 5GB a day and I can't even exceed that limit for 3 months in total!