Aggregator Hotlinking

Image hotlinking protection breaks online aggregators, but bandwidth doesn’t matter anymore so it’s moot.

5 thoughts on “Aggregator Hotlinking

  1. “bandwidth doesn’t matter anymore”

    How d’ya figure? I’m still bandwidth conscious even though I have an overly generous host that dishes up all the bandwidth I need; maybe that’s a remnant of a time past, but I’m reluctant to yet toss that caution to the wind.

  2. For $99 a month (or less) you can get a cheap server with a terabyte of bandwidth.The internet infrastructure in the United States is so mature that there is a ridiculous amount of over-capacity, hence the low bandwidth prices. The mosaic picture I posted the other month “cost” me hundreds of gigabytes of traffic because of its size and because of people linking to it, directly or through the entry. 5 years ago that would have cost me at least a thousand dollars in bandwidth charges for that month. But I hardly noticed it because even with usage many times over my normal (for the entire server) it was still well within my pre-alloted amount of bandwidth for that month for that one server.

  3. It’s not always bandwidth that matters, but it irks me to think that everytime someone else’s page loads, it sends a request to my webserver. It’s just… er, nasty.

    And thanks for linking to that. I’ve been wanting to write selective blocking of offending hotlinking domains, and the first commenter there posted exactly what I needed.

  4. But you see Matt, not all of us can afford such big hosting plans, so for us, bandwidth does matter. I can’t afford a $99/month plan, additionally its too much waste for me. I get a plan that is sized right for me. If someone is going to steal the bandwidth I’m paying for, I will properly block them through whatever means necessary. Since “bandwidth doesn’t matter anymore” they can use their own.

  5. I agree everyone doesn’t need that big of a hosting plan, but if a small host can get 10 people together in a co-op type situation, there you’ve covered the cost of the server @ $10 each. That’s 100 GB of bandwidth and probably about 8 GB of storage per person for less than what most people pay for hosting nowadays.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS