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If you are getting stung by large bandwidth bills because someone is hot linking your images, copy the following lines in to your .htaccess file.

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RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?yoursite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/2806/hotlink.gif [L]

The first condition only allows referals from your site (replace yoursite\.com with your own domain)

The second condition allows Google to link to the images, allowing the use Google Image Crawler

The third condition allows referals from google cache

The final condition allows blank referals

Finally the rewrite rule rewrites any request for images to an image hosted on imageshack.us