Today’s tutorial is quite simple.

Have you ever taken time to review your logs only to find spikes in website bandwidth usage?

If not, then you might want to go and read up on how people are *stealing* your bandwidth, images and doing so at your expense.

You may or may not know, but there are quite a few website owners that scrape other people’s websites for content and images.

I mean, you and others worked so hard to perfect the writing craft, and image selection and presentation for each piece of written content.

So, why should you lose out to others stealing your content, images and bandwidth?

About that bandwidth comment.  Not only do scrapers thieve your content and images, but most tend to link, also known as hotlinking, to your images from their content.

That means you’re freely giving away the image and YOUR bandwidth for the image to shown on their website, yet hosted and paid for by you.

That’s not fair, nor should it be legal.  But fortunately, the following snippet of code can stop thieves from hotlinking images and hijacking your images at the expense of bandwidth.