vDeck Tutorial: How To Prevent Other Websites From Linking To Linking Directly To Your Files

A couple of months ago I’ve made a post on How To Prevent HotLinking with cPanel. If you don’t know what hotlinking is, hotlinking is when another website links directly to your downloadable files or when they display images served from your server.

So what’s the problem with hotlinking? When a website is hotlinking your files, it uses your bandwidth and storage space while they get the traffic and you don’t.

This time around, I’ll show you how to prevent hotlinking with vDeck, another popular control panel.

How To Prevent Hotlinking With vDeck

This tutorial has been done with StartLogic’s control panel so yours might differ a little from the screenshots you will find here.

Assuming you’re already logged in vDeck, click on the “.htaccess editor” icon.

On the next page, click on the HotLink Protection link from the top left corner. Now when you want to prevent hotlinking, you can do this on a per-directory basis, meaning that you can still allow hotlinking on some folders’ content.

In this case, we’ll be protecting our whole website. In the “Edit Hotlink Protection” form, you will see two options:

• Enable hotlink protection for this directory and each directory beneath it
  Checking this option will prevent hotlinking to any files on your website, including subdirectories.
• Allow direct requests (such as entering the URL directly or embedding in email)
  This option will allow people to access files on your website if they type in the URL directly in their browser or if they send a link or image by email. But this will still prevent other websites from embedding images from your website into their pages for instance.

So depending on what you want to do, check the appropriate options. You also have the option of redirecting visitors to a particular page on your website when they access your content through another website who tried to hotlink your files. This way you could create a page that would say something like “Hotlinking is not allowed” and redirect visitors to this page.

Next, in the text area below these options, you can specify exceptions. So for instance, if you want to allow a particular website to link directly to your files, simply add it there. By default, you will see your own website’s URL so just leave it this way if you don’t want to add any exceptions.

And finally, you can also specify which file extensions you want to protect. So for example, you could choose to protect .zip or .pdf files too.

So that’s it, just hit the “Save” button to enable hotlinking protection and you’re done!

Links

• vDeck Website
• StartLogic Website
• StartLogic Reviews

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