Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Preventing File Hotlinking

[Fatty]

Hi,

We lose about 200gb a month to hotlinkers. Now I know about using the apache module to protect images, though I don't use it as many people have reported that they have troubles. No doubt their browser security ettings or such.

What I am really interested in is preventing people from hotlinking to files like .mov etc. The rewrite code does not do this, they can still right click and download form a link on another site.

I need a way to rename files on the server and automatically change the same file on the page. I am sure this would be fairly easy to do in PHP or something substituting filenames for a variable or such and changing that....

Any ideas, I really don't have the expertise or the time to impliment our own solution. We would definetly look at a commercial solution to this. As I say it costs us quite a bit.

Thanks!

[pyoor]

To stop image hotlinking (bandwidth stealing sucks!) I recommend you look at this site.... It explains it fairly simply (as simple as you can make it anyways)

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess10.shtml

[Fatty]

Thanks! I ended up using a php program to partly hide the urls and htaccess to cover the rest.

[BiGWill]

Nice tutorial ...
What about direct Linking to whole sites?
Instead of going via index.html to site32.html going directly to site32.html
Is there also a way to prevent this somehow? Telling users to not bookmark sites, and access them directly, rather than going via index.html ?

Thanks!

[Dylan]

yes, there are quite a few examples in the URL Rewriting Guide

[vito]

Originally posted by Fatty
Thanks! I ended up using a php program to partly hide the urls and htaccess to cover the rest.

Fatty, would you mind telling me which php program you used? I need something like this as well...

Thanks.

Vito