Why it never hurts to double-check your hotlink protection

If you’ve owned a website for any period of time, chances are good you understand the importance of hotlink protection. Thousands of leechers hotlinking can take down the fastest of servers and rack up huge bandwidth bills. I’ve always made sure to set up hotlink protection of my sites, but was surprised yesterday to find that one of my sites was gobbling up bandwidth.

This particular site, a WordPress blog, normally uses 2GB of data transfer in a month, but had gone through 6GB and was using quite a bit of memory. As it turns out, I had forgotten to setup hotlink protection after switching server providers a few months ago. I was lucky to catch the problem before it became much worse. Lesson learned– it never hurts to double-check your hotlink protection.