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Weekend Roundup #40

Jaypee Habaradas — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:30:09 +0000

So far my weekend’s been great. How about you guys? Hope you’re also enjoying the weekend like me. Some of the scheduled activities got canceled so this weekend wasn’t so busy. I also won’t be playing basketball today coz my fingers still hurt. For those of you who don’t know, I injured my right middle and ring fingers while playing basketball last Sunday. So last week, I was practically blogging with my “injured” fingers..hehe it was difficult and quite painful at times, but I was able to work and perform other daily chores, including blogging. Anyways, hope you guys like this weeks edition of the Weekend Roundup. Enjoy!

Blogging

Technology

Gadgets

Pinoy Blogs

JaypeeOnline Weekly Recap

Btw, I’d like to invite you guys to join my friend Raju’s blog contest over at TechPP. He’s giving away $400 worth of gadgets. What are you waiting for? You could win a cool Watch with integrated GSM phone or a Bluetooth+mp3 player sunglasses. Check it out now!

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Thank you for your time and hope you guys have a great week!

HowTo: Prevent Bandwidth Theft or Hotlinking

Jaypee Habaradas — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:30:24 +0000

Hotlinking, inline linking, direct linking, leeching or bandwidth theft. Call it whatever you want but it all means the same thing, the loss of precious bandwidth. Bandwidth theft is very rampant in the world wide web.

If you don’t pay for hosting or don’t have any bandwidth limits, then you might not be worried about it. But to those who pay for web hosting, especially those who have a small monthly bandwidth limit, every byte counts. You wouldn’t want to exceed your limit because other people are using up your bandwidth by hotlinking your files, right?

One way of protecting your files from hotlinking is by inserting certain rules in your .htaccess file. In the following examples, the files being protected are image files. You can change them to any file formats that you wish to protect.

NOTE:
For WordPress users, you can insert these lines of code right before the line # BEGIN WordPress in your .htaccess file. Make sure you make a backup of your .htaccess file before editing it.

Block a specific domain
This code will return a 403 Forbidden Error instead of the file only when the image is requested by the specified domains in this example: domain.net & domain.com

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?domain\.net/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|JPEG|jpe|JPE|jpg|JPG|gif|GIF|png|PNG|mng|MNG)$ - [F]

Block all domains
This code will return a 403 Forbidden Error instead of the requested file to all domains except domain.com, which should be changed to the domain name of your site or where the file is used.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|png)$ - [F]

If you already have disabled hotlinking or activated a anti-hotlinking measure, then good for you! If not, then you should. You wouldn’t want to lose precious bandwidth to hotlinking don’t you?

To check if your files are safe or if your hotlinking measures are working, check out this free online anti-hotlinking testing tool. If you’re worried about messing with your .htaccess file, you can try this .htaccess editor that’s recommended by AJ.

I’ve had several experiences of bandwidth theft and people hotlinking to my images. Well, that was before I disabled hotlinking. Now, I don’t even worry about it. How about you, have you had any experience of someone hotlinking your files? What did you do about it? What are the anti-hotlinking measures you’re taking? Tell us about it.

DreamHost Blocks Googlebot?

Jaypee Habaradas — Tue, 22 May 2007 23:17:02 +0000

The owner of Romanian site Zoso.ro allegedly received an email recently from his web host Dreamhost ordering him to block Googlebot from his sites that have high traffic as it was causing heavy load on the webserver.

Here’s the alleged email sent by Dreamhost:

This email is to inform you that a few of your sites were getting hammered by Google bot. This was causing a heavy load on the webserver, and in turn affecting other customers on your shared server. In order to maintain stability on the webserver, I was forced to block Google bot via the .htaccess file.
[Limit GET HEAD POST
order allow,deny
deny from 66.249
allow from all]
You also want to consider making your files be unsearchable by robots and crawlers, as that usually contributes to high number of hits. If they hit a dynamic file, like php, it can cause high memory usage and consequently high load…

I moved to Dreamhost just over a month now and so far I haven’t encountered any hosting problems related to Googlebot nor have I received any emails like the one above. It could probably be because my blog doesn’t have much site traffic. Googlebot is known to take up an enormous amount of bandwidth causing websites to exceed their bandwidth limit and be taken down temporarily. I guess a part of this story is true, that some of the sites involved did cause a heavy load on the shared server due to site traffic and Googlebot activity.

I’m not sure about this but it seems to be an unlikely move by an established web hosting company such as Dreamhost. I’m thinking that this is just a hoax and I haven’t confirmed if this story is true or not. But if it were true, it would definitely affect the image of Dreamhost and the confidence of current and future customers.

Hopefully someone from Dreamhost gets to read this and can give an explanation or confirm if this story is true or not. I’ll update this post as soon as I confirm the validity of this story.