[How To?] Hotlinking No No

[Nicole-Studios]

I want to keep others from taking images directly from my site and using them elsewhere. Initially, for those who don't know, this is called hotlinking and steals bandwidth. I want to keep this from happening to my site. HOWEVER:

I've found a place that explained to me how to stop others from Hotlinking images from my site. It explains that I should put this in my .htaccess folder (I know what this is and where it is) BUT want to make sure that this isn't some sort of security risk or some 'joke' and wanted some feedback from others to see if this is for sure the correct way to do it or if there are better ways to do so.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://i.imgur.com/qX4w7.gif [L]

http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html
http://altlab.com/hotlinking.html


My Forum:
http://aashirya.sunwolves.com/

[johnnyvang]

Check your hosting account.
In Cpanel ther's a option to protect you for hotlinking.
Enable it and only give up your sites full url your done.
No need to add something into your htaccess file.

[Nicole-Studios]

I'm hosted by free hosting, I do not have access to the cpanel, so unfortunantly can't do that.

My question still stands though, should I add this to the htaccess file or no?

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Bump....