Avoid hotlinking and get more traffic

The real thing is that since I run a team of coders and most of my incomes come from programming, I did not pay attention to hosting statistics. But then I decided to put Google ads on the site so I started looking to those numbers; especially bandwidth and page views.

The facts: I had a folder with zip files on my site, and on any page where I was offering a game for download a link was there to just click and get the file.

The problem: Many forums and sites started putting links to my files directly, not to my pages, so somebody was drinking up all my bandwidth, without even watching my site. That was unacceptable, don't you think? Having hosted my site in a Shared .NET hosting with IIS I couldn't play with IIS as on a dedicated server, and it was not Apache so, no .htaccess, right?

The solution: Being myself a .NET coder the solution was quick, I coded a page called download.aspx that allow clients to download files from my hosting, by clicking a button. That button just writes the file content to the page's output stream. Of course, I had to move files to a new location and also take care about some security measures.

What happened?
It worked just fine, right after updated the site, statistics went up, I almost duplicated the amount of visits and page views, while saving 45% of the bandwidth. That was translated to more people getting my games, more links to my site, more PR, more hits, more Google revenues and so on, so you just do the math.

My advice: Avoid hotlinking, get more traffic.

Thanks
Leo