Firstly please excuse my lengthy post, but please bear with me......

Up until recently my website has never been heavily used, which is fine for me - my hosting plan allows for 2.5 Gb bandwidth limit per month, which was fine as I used to average about 500 mb per month. However, since April 4th 2007 this has massively jumped, to the point where (like now) my limit is exceeded before I'm halfway through the month.

I have one page, (not my homepage though), which links to a large number of jpegs, (1100 images averaging 85k in size), but this has been true for over a year, and up until recently I hadn't had any bandwidth issues.

I have now added a .htaccess file, (to stop any hot-linking), and robots.txt file, (to stop crawlers), to my public_html directory, but this doesn't seem to have made any difference. Looking at my access logs it still appears to be crawlers crawling the page which links to the images which is really hammering my bandwidth, but I don't understand either why it's just started happening, (although I haven't really changed my site design), or why I seem powerless to stop it ???

Can anyone help me please