My Bandwidth is Exceeded and now I'm locked out of my Blog.

This is what my Host told me was the problem:

The problem appears to be that several people found and shared the link to the picture. Rather than copy it to their web space they posted the link to your site instead. These sites appear to be very active sites so there were a lot of hits coming from those sites which used up your bandwidth rather than theirs. This is called Hotlinking. By turning on the hotlink protection it prevents them from being able to view the picture and will only use a few bytes of your bandwidth rather than several thousand.

I'm using ver 3.2 MT and I turned on this Hotlink option and still got a waring that I was about to exceed my limit. Well I did exceed it today and now can't get into my Blog.

It looks like this stuff is cominfg from something called http://profile.myspace.com...

Does anyone know about this myspace.com

Does anyone else have this problem>

Mick

When you get back into your hosting service, simply change the name of the offending file(s) and update your MT entries accordingly. You might also replace the original file with one displaying a suitable message - "Don't steal my bandwidth" springs to mind.

In addition send the webmasters of the sites linking to your image an invoice to cover the increased bandwidth costs.

I actually tried that on one picture that they seemed interested in but still they came.

I'm stll locked out. I'm trying to see if they will up me to 35GB bandwidth for 2 months during which time I'll get rid of my 2004 archives to see if that helps if my bandwidth continues to grow I'll just say screw it and close down my Blog.

To me it's like having a saving account at a bank and some jerk robs the bank so they throw me into jail because I have an account there.

Think that's not a bad idea to bill the other site.

This comes from the Apache Cookbook (published by O'Reilly)

the following placed in an .htaccess file usually works pretty well

Requires that your host provider have mod_rewrite enabled in the webserver and that you're allowed to use .htaccess files in your web directory.
Replace http://mysite.com/ with something appropriate

It chceks the HTTP_REFERER of any incoming requests for a graphics file and allows the request if the HTTP_REFERER is blank (not all browsers set it) or if it's referred from your site. Everything else is rejected.

aside from configuring the server to deny external referers, about the only other thing you can do is email the owner of the offending website(s) and ask them to remove the picture they're linking to.

I haven't been locked out yet but I am also having trouble with myspace.com and xanga.com, who both encourage their many users to hotlink. Their free accounts don't allow for much space so they tell them either to hotlink or buy their premium accounts. Most of their users are teenagers and novices so their preference is to keep their free accounts. To be fair, many of them don't think they're doing anything wrong. Many attempts to prevent this with .htaccess from both me and my host have been futile.

I'd love for a solution to this practice from within Movable Type; either as an option in the settings menu or from within the templates that would disable right-click-save and hotlinking. I know this would probably not defeat a determined internet savvy thief but it might stop the novices, who are the vast majority of the culprits.

Any ideas?

Can you elaborate on why the standard .htaccess file didn't work. As long as you entered your actual site instead of "mysite.com," it should work fine.

The one improvement I would suggest is to quarantine all uploaded content into a directory separate from your archives directory. I use "/assets"

This has two benefits: First, if I screw up my templates or just need to clean house, I can blindly delete my entire archives directory and then rebuild all. Since the only files in there are files that MT created, I don't risk losing anything. Second, you can then put the .htaccess file in the assets directory. Visitors can then come to pages in your site from links on other sites, but they can't directly access your image/uploaded assets from pages on other sites.

I'm not sure. It worked beautifully on a site that I was going to make an exception for but the offending sites I was most interested in preventing hotlinking to still worked. Still working on it.