How To Secure Your Download Files And Bandwidth 
Posted by Udegbunam Chukwudi on October - 13 - 2010
Photo Credit: viZZZual.com
Congratulations on setting up your own online information product business or blog and looking forward to finally going live in cyberspace and making money but hey there, have you actually got all your bases covered?
Do you know that there are some little things that could actually harm your business before you can say jack?
One of them is cyber theft of your e-products and the precious bandwidth.
In most cases this is inevitable if you sell e-products without some sort of a time limited password to your download area. Customers who have paid for your product can pass around the link to your unsecured download area making you lose potential dollars.
With this post I plan to show you two time tested and trusted ways of securing your download files and bandwidth at the same time.
How To Enable HotLink Protection On Your Site
If your web host uses CPanel, it’s time to put its’ hotlink protection feature in good use. Hotlink Protection can be found under Security in Cpanel.
HotLink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified below) on your website. Other sites will still be able to link to any file type that you don’t specify below (ie. html files). An example of hot linking would be using a <img> tag to display an image from your site from somewhere else on the net. The end result is that the other site is stealing your bandwidth. You should ensure that all sites that you wish to allow direct links from are in the list below. This system attempts to add all sites it knows you own to the list, however you may need to add others.
What this means is that it blocks access to specified files on your webhosting account UNLESS they are been requested from sites that have permission to link to them.
It’s quite simple to configure and shown below is a capture of my configuration of HotLink Protection.
With the above Hotlinking Protection configuration, no site other than mine would have direct access to my jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp, pdf, zip & rar files.
For example, if someone tries to share this link www.strictlyonlinebiz.com/hotness.pdf on a forum like www.alabiforum.com, they would get an access denied error each time they try to download the file UNLESS they log onto my site and use the link found on my site. Also if No. 4 in the image above is selected, simply copying and pasting www.strictlyonlinebiz.com/hotness.pdf into the address bar of any web browser will give instant access to hotness.pdf
CAUTION: Due to problems with images apearing in feeds and all that, I’ve only enbled hotlinking for pdf, zip and rar files on this blog.
Using A Blank HTML File In Your Download Directory
If for example you gave out a download link to a customer such as this one www.free.com/products/intense.zip, he/she could type in www.free.com/products/ into a web browser and get free access to a list of all the files within that directory which includes both the product he/she paid for and that he/she didn’t pay for. Uploading a blank index.html file into the directory where your download files are in a good move. Personally my own blank index.html auto-refreshes itself and sends the snooper to my blog’s home page.
Finally, while we are still very much on the topic of securing download files and bandwidth, those of you that blog using self-hosted WordPress are encouraged to completely secure their blogs now (Ampercent is one of the best out there)!
Feel free to leave a comment or share with us other ways of securing download files and bandwidth.
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nice post, that will reduce the cost in online business
Good article Chukwudi !
I still don’t hjave Hot link Protection enabled in My site. I will surely enable the Hot link Protection soon !
And Thanks for the refrence !
Keep Rocking !
I think another thing you may want to add is to disallow search engine bots from crawling your secured pages. You surely don’t want your download page to be indexed by search engines and be available for everyone to see.
Thanks for all your comments.
@ Amit Banerjee: Thanks for stopping by again and am I mighty glad this post thought you something new. t least I know I’m giving back a little for all the favors you’ve done for me.
@ Terry: Wow! I’m quite surprised I left that one out. Guess it must have escaped my mind. To implement that simply add Disallow: /directory of downloads or download page/ to your robots.txt file. Thanks for the tip
No problem and you are very much welcome.
And thanks too for sharing several ways to secure your bandwidth and download pages. Great tips especially for beginners.
Thanks a lot for sharing these great tips. Given that cybertheft can really harm our online businesses, it’s important to have our secure pages totally secure, or else we’ll end up losing money that we worked so hard for.
Nice Tips. I also think there’s a third way which is more safer especially if you are selling stuff like e-books on your site. You would need to store them in a remote folder in your web’s root. This will make it only accessible by your cgi or script that will execute the download. That will prevent people who buy your book from sharing links since there really would be no direct link to it.
Thanks for the tip. I would have to learn a bit about cgi to get that working
Hi,
I must say this is one of the best tips I seen.after reading this i realized the importance of enabling hotlink protection in my blog
You are not updating your site. Any special reason?
Ever since I discovered I was getting stressed out frequently, I’ve decided not to blog when I’m not in the mood. This way I can save my strength for my day job which is more important right now and I can also be able to write the best of posts since I’ve got loads of time to work on my ideas
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This is part of the reason why I removed dates from my posts and comments
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Great tip buddy
Even my blog exceeded the bandwidth limit few months back. Reason was someone had linked images of my blog in them! Finally sent a notice to them.
Nice share!
Thanks man. Hope you managed to keep them hot-linkers out for life. Adding watermarks to your images helps a lot to as they would be not be appealing to site content scrapers
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If you’re using a wireless network, the best way to protect your bandwidth is to password protect it. If you’re using a wireless network in a building, someone within the same building can easily use your network to browse and download files, thus resulting in a bandwidth outage and increased bill for you. So make sure your network is password protected and only authorized personnel has access to it.
Thanks for your contribution though this post is about securing the download of files on a server and not the internet
hey Str Online Biz! Been quite busy lately! Hows the med practice going? been reading most of your blog updates but most are about blogger…..(am jealous). anyway, just to say hi, Havent started selling products online yet, so maybe one day when i do, i will come back to this post again.
As I’m replying comments at this moments, I yawning like mad. Exhaustion wan kill person coupled with Malaria again. I had plans to churn out two posts this week but in my current condition, I might have to postpone them till next week
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Thanks so much for this usable tip! Frankly, I didn’t know the usefulness of this hotlink protection tool. I have always used a index.html to redirect to the home page. I’ll definitely go on and implement this tip right away.
Thanks for this wonderful post, Chukwudi. I know this content will help me in some or the other way to secure my website.
Thanks for the great tips to protect files. If you offer ebooks or downloads there’s a very real chance you’ll get ripped off.
Thanks for the Great post… never knew about Hotlink feature in my cpanel and another one is quite tricky
frankly never knew about this,will have to check it out on my web host.
thanks chuks.
You’re welcome man.
Really a nice tutor bro…But is there any plugin to make it easy
– Sudharsan @ Technoskillonline
I’m not aware of any plugin that could assist in doing this for now.
P.S: Do please stick to my comment policy when next you comment on my blog. I fixed this one ’cause I’ve been around your blog before
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I used to wonder what is the use of HotLink protection each time I came across it on my cPanel. I now understand what it is and how to use it when the time comes.
yes definitely all the above mentioned methods are compulsory to survive online. especially on the face that your directory structure should not be visible to all the people visiting the site. and uploading a index.php file and making it link to your sitemap would make good content linking and less prone to hacking. by the way this is very good work thank you for publishing