Many web site owners have a hosting or co-location plan that limits the amount of bandwidth their web site can use each month. With the proliferation of user spaces on sites such as MySpace, Facebook, etc, people using those services, as well as other web site owners, copy the code for an image from your web site, and put it into a page on their site. This means that each time that person’s page loads for a reader, the image comes from your server, and uses your bandwidth to serve it. This practice is called hotlinking. The bandwidth you purchase can get chewed up in a hurry if too many people do this to you. Fortunately there is a solution.

This tutorial applies to Apache web server only.

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