I was quite surprised to find out that my blog bandwidth had reached its limit and my website was effectively not served to new visitors!?! What? It can’t be true. I had plenty of bandwidth available and second – my blog is not Ashton Kutcher’s hence my silly face.
The first thing that occurred to me was that someone was stealing my bandwidth. How? I had to find out.
A quick look at my ftp and http stats showed that a few Honk Kong users have shown particular interest in a couple of my images. They have linked to the jpg files from their porn forum signatures and bob’s your uncle :^). That forum must have had lots of users reading posts as nearly 6 GB were used to load these images in just a few days. Wow! And I was paying for the free lunch! 
No more Mr. Nice Guy!!!
A quick google search gathered me with some useful .htaccess file modification which does the trick I needed. I even got a little bonus. The script not only blocks any image files being served by http but displays a cheeky image to replace the ones being hotlinked. Here is the image that will appear from now on instead of the ones that were hotlinked:
I would like to thank the cheeky hotlinkers for displaying this lovely image promoting my blog. I wish them all the best! Meanwhile Hong Kong web surfers, welcome to humble my website. It’s nothing like the porn forum you’ve been actively visiting but I hope it can still represent some kind of interest. Enjoy!
For all the other folk I recommend you protect yourself with this .htaccess mixed modification courtesy of both David Airey and Techgyo.com:
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<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mywebsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !msn\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bing\. [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]
</ifModule>
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Please note you have to change “mywebsite” with your website name. Then create your cheeky jpg image, name it nohotlink and then change the file extension from .jpg to .jpe so the image can be displayed on the hotlinkers’ websites. As you can see I have allowed google, msn, yahoo and bing to serve my images in their search results. I have allowed the good guys and restricted the bad guys.
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