How to prevent bandwidth theft or Hotlinking

How to use the Hotlink Protection feature in SiteWorx to help protect your site's images and videos from potential hotlinking and bandwidth theft.

Definition

Bandwidth theft, or "hotlinking," occurs when someone links to a file on your website or server from their website. Without adequate protection, a hotlinked video will use your bandwidth for all users viewing the video, even if they are viewing from another website. 

Since your bandwidth is limited according by your specific hosting package, hotlinking can potentially cause bandwidth overage and subsequent fees.  

Method

ATTENTION: This method only works for Nexcess clients on physical (non-cloud) servers. If you are a Nexcess Cloud client, please contact our support team.

1. Log in to your SiteWorx account.

   • If you do not know your password, click Forgot your password on the login page.
   • If you do not know the web address for your SiteWorx login page, either refer to your Welcome Email or contact our 24-hour support team for assistance.
     
     

2. From the main menu, click Hosting Features > Htaccess.

3. Click the Hotlink Protection link for the directory that you want to manage.

4. Specify the hotlink protection properties, as follows:

   1. Hotlink Protection Status: Enable, or on, and disable, or off hotlink protection. Blocked Extensions: Type the file extensions you want to be protected from hotlinking. For example, .gif, .jpg, .wmv, or .mov. One extension is entered per line.

   2. Allowed Domains: Type the names of the domains you want to allow hotlinking to files with the extensions you entered in the Blocked Extensions field.
      
      ATTENTION: The domains you own and manage in SiteWorx will always be allowed to hotlink to the listed extensions and will be automatically populated in the Allowed Domains field.

   3. Allow Direct Access: Decide whether you want to allow direct access to the blocked content. For example, if you want to directly access an image on your site, you would enter the path in your browser's address bar. For example,  http://yoursite.com/images/example.gif. Or direct access allows access to the protected extensions when the HTTP _REFERRER field if the .htaccess file is empty.

      • If you select Off, the request to directly access a file will be blocked.

      • If you select On, this type of direct access will be allowed, and only embedded hotlink attempts will be blocked.

   4. Replace With: If you want to replace the blocked content with a different image file, type the URL of this file in the text field. If this option is set with a valid, absolute URL to an image file, for example, http://www.somedomain.com/replaceimg.jpg, a hotlinked image will be replaced with this URL . If this option is not set, a hotlinked image will return a 403 Forbidden response.

5. Click Update.