Leeching

[corley]

I am trying to cut back on some bandwidth leeching on a large site I help. We have over 2 Gigs of images stored, and we have just now implemented image hotlinking protection utilizing mod_rewrite. This wasn't our primary concern, but it cuts back a little. Our primary concern are the users who utilize offline browsers and things such as wget -r to get every single page on our site including images. This is a large amount of downloads.

Do you know of anything to implement to prevent this type of leeching? tia.

[jerdo]

You could try mod_throttle to limit the download speed or total requests allowed.
http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/

Or if you are looking for a bunch of tools try looking here http://www.apachetoolbox.com/

[dwhswebhosting]

I think the best way to help this is to create a log in page and disable being able to link to the secure pages directly.

This way they can only see what's in the secure pages one page at a time. It should block spider type grabbing software since the software needs to go to each page.

There is nifty article on how to do this with .htaccess here:

http://www.easywebsitepromotion.com/website-promotion/htaccess-tips-tricks.htm

Good luck,

-Charles 🆒