Bandwidth Leeching

(Jul 2006 - page 1 of 4)

Introduction

Bandwidth leeching (or leaching, depending on your preference) describes the practice of stealing another website's bandwidth. Most websites have a bandwidth allowance each month, typically a couple of gigabytes, and every time a page is viewed on the site, all of the text, images, and any other content on the page eats into that monthly allowance.

So let's say you have a web page on your site which consists of 100kb of text, and a 1mb jpeg of you on your summer holidays. Every time someone browses to your page it costs you approximately 1.1mb in bandwidth - if your monthly bandwidth allowance was only 100mb, your page could only be viewed about 90 times before your allowance was used up.

But let's say that instead of hosting your summer holidays photo on your own page, you simply linked to a copy of the photo from your friend's website (a process known as "hotlinking") - now every time someone views your page it only costs you 100kb for the text - the 1mb of bandwidth required for the jpeg is supplied by your friend's website. With a 100mb bandwidth allowance your page could now be viewed over a 1000 times.

Bandwidth leeching is stealing - someone is paying for that bandwidth, and if it aint you, it's somebody else. It's the same thing as someone plugging an extension cable into a socket in your house, and running an electrical appliance in their own house using your electricity.

In all fairness the majority of bandwidth leeching is probably an accident, but that doesn't make it any less annoying for the victims.

Possible solutions

So how do you stop someone leeching your bandwidth? It's not easy, but you do have a few options (I'm going to talk here only about protecting images on your site, but many of the techniques and principals can be applied to other resources too, such as videos, MP3s, etc). I've split the solutions into broadly technical and non-technical categories.

Note that this is just a summary of possible solutions, not an in-depth tutorial in how to implement them. Once you've found a technique which appeals to you, google will tell you what to do next.

Next page: Non-technical solutions...