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Your hosting company sounds like a real nightmare ... I've never heard of anybody refusing to install such a basic protection feature ... Especially when most do it for a small one time fee ....
HT Access is good, and it cuts down on a lot of casual hotlinking ... but there are hacks that more sophisticated pirates use to bypass it ...
This may be not feasible for you, especially if you have a ton of pics, But you might want to consider pic slicing.
Basically you slice the pic into four smaller html pieces (I'm just using four as an example, you can do more or less than that. The more you slice the pic the harder it is to pirate) ...
That way when they hot link into it ... they're only getting a small piece of the photo ... not the entire image ...
You can pick up a program like Ulead's Photoimpact 6 for less than $50, and it does pic slicing ... among many other things ...
But there is a downside ... slicing can increase the pic's load time on the page by as much as one second per pic ... So, in order for this to work, it really depends on how your site is set up ...
You can either optimize the photo more or perhaps slice only select photos that are more valuable than others ...
It takes a little time getting the hang of slicing ... but once you figure it out ... it's pretty easy ... especially with a pic slicing program ....
But if you're talking tons of pics ... that's a major undertaking ... although it's something to consider while you're building new pages or whatever ...
If you can make it work though .... the pirate boards probably won't want to hot link to you again ... LOL
[This message has been edited by erotictrance (edited 01-09-2002).]
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