Is your server facing problems of seriving contents to the other's website?

When your bandwidth is stolen by thirparty servers or applications, you lose an image. You can not get credits of the contents you have in your own website. So, be careful that other websites are not giving a direct links to your images, video, or audio or other large size files. Sometimes, a term named "hot linking prevention" refers to a safety measure to NOT to serve these contents to third parties.

The serving logic is very simple. Your server must check that the referal link (from where your resources are linked to) must be the same server. This filters out the third party applications and other websites deprived of displaying your contents into their websites. This is a bandwidth piracy. Linking to the another server's direct resources saves a lot of hosting space and download bandwidth of the server who steals other's bandwidths.

Here are few of my tips for your server to prevent.

• Enable hotlinking prevention in your domain control panel.
• Instead of making the thief frustrating of not getting the contents from your server, just advertise with your logo, contents and images with low resolution/.
• Sometimes, you can redirect their links into your homepage or other useful stuffs.

For best practices, try to serve or use your contents only. Less creative website-owners or providers with dark intentsions only steal contents from original resources, internally. You should not leech others bandwidth. If you find somebody is leeching your bandwidth, findout and prevent your web server against such threats. Bandwidth costs a lot.