Anti-Leech with .htaccess

[leonard]

NOTE: The will only work for domains hosted under Linux plans

Create the .htaccess file

Warning: If you are using FrontPage to publish your site and have the FrontPage extension turned ON, this tutorial may not work for you. In fact, it might corrupt your FrontPage Extensions. Use at your own risk.

Open Notepad (or equivalent software depending on your OS) and paste in the following:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yousite.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yousite.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule [^/]+.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|jpeg|JPEG|png|PNG)$ - [F]

If you wish to return an image, stating they're not permitted to access your images, modify the first RewriteRule line to this:

RewriteRule [^/]+.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|jpeg|JPEG|png|PNG)$ http://www.yoursite.com/restricted.gif [R,L]

Save the file as .htaccess (the .txt extension will be appended).
Note: If anti-leeching is used along with sub domains, you'll need to create a .htaccess for each sub domain with the following code for protecting your images:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://sub.yoursite.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule [^/]+.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|jpeg|JPEG|png|PNG)$ - [F] # No access to images

Uploading the .htaccess file

Upload the .htaccess.txt file via FTP in ASCII mode and place in the domain folder you are protecting.
(Sub domain .htaccess files should be placed in the folder for that sub domain)

After uploaded right click the file (server copy) and choose rename
Edit the file name, so that it will be .htaccess (without the .txt extension)
Other web sites will now not be able to leech any images from your site.