How to deal with URLs that has been hotlinked?

Question

My website assets have been hot linked by many other websites. I doubt whether these are responsible for the downtimes on my site.

1. How should I deal with such links?
2. Will deleting the links solve the issue?
3. Also, will hotlinking use up the servers entry process?

Answer 1

To stop hotlinking you can add the following to your .htaccess file. Replace example.com on line 3 with your own domain name. Also add or remove any file extensions on line 4

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|bmp|zip|rar|mp3)$ - [F]

Maybe you prefer some mischief and want to serve alternate content when hotlinking is detected.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.example.com/backside.gif [R,L]