How Do I Stop Hotlinking and
Bandwidth Theft!
You can stop others from hotlinking your
site's files by placing a file called .htaccess in
your Apache site root (main) directory. The period before the
name makes the file hidden - When using our control panel - make
sure you enabled "show hidden files" allowing you to view and
edit your .htaccess file.
Example: Your url is www.mysite.com. To stop hotlinking
your images from other sites,
place the following code in your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /media/nohotlinks.png [L]
* Before we do any redirect, we set down some conditions — those
are the two RewriteConds. The first checks if the variable
HTTP_REFERER does not start with either http://yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com (the
question mark meaning “zero or one occurences of the
preceding brackets,” and the exclamation mark negating
the match). The [NC] flag simply makes the match case-insensitive.
* The second condition checks if no referrer was sent, which
may occur if a visitor typed the image’s address into
the location bar. We don’t want to block those requests.
* The third condition checks if the referrer header does actually
contain another website’s URL. This is to guard against
doing the wrong thing in the case of users with special software
on their computers that replace all referrer headers they send
with text like “Blocked by personal firewall.” Again,
we don’t want to block those requests.
* If all of these conditions are true, we know that the image
is being requested from a remote site, and can go ahead with
the redirect. “HTTP_REFERER” (with one ‘r’)
is not a mistake; some joker on the HTTP team just couldn’t
spell, and this has survived as a geeky joke ever since.
* The RewriteRule itself is a simple one. It simply looks at
the file extension of the file being served. If the file has
any of the extensions listed, it is rewritten to our ‘nohotlinks’ image.
If you would like instead to simply block the images completely
and not redirect to another image, you can send back a “403
Forbidden” error
message by replacing the RewriteRule above with
this:
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]
Solution 2
To stop hotlinking from specific outside
domains only, such as myspace.com,
blogspot.com and livejournal.com, but allow
any other web site to hotlink images:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/
[NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe
[L]
You can add as many different domains as needed. Each RewriteCond line
should end with the [NC,OR] code. NC means to ignore upper and
lower case. OR means "Or Next", as in, match this domain or the
next line that follows. The last domain listed omits the OR code
since you want to stop matching domains after the last RewriteCond line.
You can display a 403 Forbidden error code instead of
an image. Replace the last line of the previous examples with
this line:
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]
Warning -
As with any htaccess rewrites, you may block
some legitimate traffic (such as users behind proxies or firewalls)
using these techniques.
or go to .htaccess
tools to create your .htaccess for you
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