Stop hotlinking images you little bastard

Hotlinking images is one of the most irritating issues that site admins must deal with on a daily basis. If you don’t know what hotlinking is, it is the act of using an image hosted on a secondary server (not your own) which ultimately wastes the owners bandwidth. For anyone one a hosting plans which limits bandwidth, you can imagine the problems that can and will be encountered.

The resolution? Utilize services like ImgRed.com. The process is simple. If your sticky fingers are so inclined, simply prepend the hosted image with http://imgred.com/ and the image will be copied to ImgRed servers and hosted from there rather than the originating website.

Example of a hotlinked image: http://not.yourimage.com/blue.jpg
Example of fixed link: http://imgred.com/http://not.yourimage.com/blue.jpg

See how easy that is? Now continue with your image snatching, just be courteous enough to have ImgRed host the images rather than the originating server.