....became very easy for me today: I just finished reviewing my log files to
see where the extra traffic was that had saturated my 10mbps unmetered
connection on occasion this week.

60-75% of traffic on all adult site traffic is .cn and it was ALL image
hotlinking, no standard linking at all.

As of tommorrow, all .cn traffic can bite my shiney metal ass.

(Yes - all the content was hotlink protected via htaccess)

Fleeing from the madness of the jungle
Rastus <zzrhardy@iinet.net.au> stumbled into news:alt.www.webmaster
and said:

So, what are you delivering instead of the requested image? Surely the
trick is to send just one pixel when bandwidth leeching is severe.

--
William Tasso

Save the drama
for your Mama.

For standard hotlinking - they are literally sent a picture of my pimply
ass. It isn't as bandwidth saving as the one pixel idea but it is more
rewarding.

These guys are getting around .htaccess hotlink via the scripts mentioned in
a previous thread though, so I will be blocking Chinese traffic based on IP
address. While I am at it I might as well ditch Russian traffic to. I just
need to liase with my host (it is a managed server) to find their opinion as
to whether the block should be put in at the firewall or just in httpd.conf.

Fleeing from the madness of the University of Queensland jungle
Rastus <nospam@uq.edu.au> stumbled into news:alt.www.webmaster
and said:

At the firewall, without a doubt. In fact, as close to the edge of your
network as possible to limit (as far as is possible) the impact of the
unwanted traffic.

--
William Tasso

Save the drama
for your Mama.

"Rastus" <nospam@uq.edu.au> wrote:

So you're the goatse guy?

--
John Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
NEW ----> Textpad reference card (pdf): http://johnbokma.com/textpad/

John Bokma wrote:
LMAO!!!!

--
My 2 newest domains: www.drunkandcrazy.com and www.pokerforeverybody.com
Fight spam friendly providers, use www.spews.org and www.ahbl.org

I said a picture of my "pimply ass", not "large intestines and appendix".

^_^

Just a follow up:

I removed .htaccess files from all my domains and setup serverwide anti
hotlinking rules in the httpd.conf and it is working much better.
Specifically what had the biggest impact was removing access for blank
referrer headers but this was balanced by specifically allowing domains like
google, msn, yahoo etc to hotlink so image search would still work. All
domains on the server allow hotlinking to each other of course.

I have tested the site using various hotlink testers and none of them are
gettig through at the moment so it appears to be working. I also changed it
just to break the link rather than serve up a smart-arse image. My traffic
immediately dropped from just under 10mbps to 1mbps so I didn't need to take
the next step of blocking all .cn traffic.

Rastus wrote:


That is not necessarily a good idea. The firewall on my office machine is
configured to strip the referrer header. I'm sure millions of others do
the same, they will not see your images even if they are on your site.



--
Brian Wakem
Email: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/b.wakem/myemail.png