Protect Your Site from Bandwidth Bums

Files that are delivered via the Internet use bandwidth. Every time you upload a file to your web host, surf the web, download a song, or watch a video for example, you are using bandwidth.

Bandwidth travels along special wires or fiber optic cables connecting servers to a network, such as the Internet. The capacity of the bandwidth carrier determines how much data can be delivered by the network at any one time.

ISP’s and web hosting companies can put a limitation on bandwidth at certain times during peak periods or charge you a flat fee per month for bandwidth usage. If you go over the flat fee, then they charge you extra for using extra bandwidth. Some ISP’s and some web hosts will shut down the transmissions to conserve and regulate bandwidth at times.

Bandwidth bums, or to put it less politely, bandwidth thieves link to images and other files directly to some other server instead of putting them on their local server. There are various reasons as to why they do this but the most common is probably ignorance—they just don't know it's illegal. So they “steal” files each time the a page of theirs is loaded that links to a file on someone else's website.

Of course, there are times when it's acceptable to link to files on other people's websites. YouTube, for example, encourages it by providing the code needed to embed one of their files in your web page. Unless you have permission to link to files on another server, it is illegal and very easy to get caught doing.

There’s certain ways that you can stop the person from stealing your bandwidth allocation. You can contact them ask them to stop, you can change the file name, you can contact their web host, or you can even take legal action. Prevention is the simplest method, however. Most web hosts offer "hot link protection" in the user control panel.

Click the link for hot link protection and follow the instructions to disable your files from being called by other servers.