How to protect your sites from traffic theft (see our video tutorial)
If you are running out of traffic quota with your hosting provider without any reasonable explanation for that, then you have most probably become a victim of bandwidth theft, more popular as hotlinking. Hotlinking occurs when someone links their web pages directly to images, video, audio, etc files on your site without your permission and consumes your own pre-paid traffic quota at your expense. If you do not locate this unsolicited activity on time, you may end up having to pay for extra traffic quota or even go offline.
Typical acts of hotlinking is when forum users link to a picture from another website, using them as avatars or signature images or when blogs use pictures in the posts by just creating a link to them.
To prevent similar hotlinking acts from occurring you will need to activate Hotlink Protection for your website. It is much better to block these acts before they ever occur than allowing for someone to hotlink to your multimedia files and then try to find a solution. The hotlink protection service is available as an add-on service with most web hosting providers, so make sure your host offers a hotlink feature before signing up with them. To help you get into the hotlink protection procedure, we have shot a video tutorial, walking you through all necessary steps for activating this capability on your website(s). For the procedure to look real, we have used the hotlink protection interface of the web hosting Control Panel by NTC Hosting. You can also check out the HD version of the how to activate hotlink protection video:
Tags: video tutorials