Hotlinking is when a website or blog use your image with a direct link, so result a consuption of your website bandwith. I assume that I’ve posted a photo of 2MB on my blog and people use it on their webpage without reuploading my photo on their host. Posted Photo was viewed 200 times in 1 hour and consume 400mb of traffic only in 1 hour!! In a day became 9.6 GB of traffic and for website that hosted this photo not is good. Also, there are other many reasons to block hotlinking but this article would be only a solution to prevent hotlinking.

First of all you have to upload one image called no_hotlink.gif on your images directory of your website. (this image is attached below)

no_hotlink.gif (to download it: right click and “Save Image As”)

Now you have to create a file called .htaccess and upload it on your root directory of your website, changing the text “smokinglinux.com” with the url of your website.

Copy and Paste this code on your .htaccess:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?smokinglinux\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpeg|gif|bmp|png)$ images/no_hotlink.gif [L]

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Alias is an alternative name to delivery a domain name. For example we have www.smokinglinux.com domain name configured correctly in our apache configuration files and we want other domains linking directly on our master domain or subdomains linking on www.smokinglinux.com. To know better this tutorial you have to see a configuration sample attached below:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>
ServerName www.smokinglinux.com
ServerAlias smokinglinux.com web.smokinglinux.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/smokinglinux.com
</VirtualHost>

How we can see in attached configuration code, we have a virtualhost code container with a ServerName and ServerAlias. ServerName is the main domain and ServerAlias is a set of alternatives names for main domain. In this case, when we try to reach this virtualhost by a browser, we can use “www.smokinglinux.com”, “smokinglinux.com” and “web.smokinglinux.com” to see the same website for every of these domain names.

Suppose that we want every possible subdomains linking on main domain “www.smokinglinux.com”. How we can configure it? Simply replacing with “*” before domain name on ServerAlias. For example:

ServerAlias *.smokinglinux.com

To make your Alias configuration working, you have to configure correctly your domain DNS. In fact, if you want a subdomain as ServerAlias, you must configure DNS with A record pointing on IP of main domain name.

To write apache configuration files you can edit httpd.conf or for new versions of apache, you can create a new file under ./site-available and then by shell: “a2ensite filename”, to enable configuration file under apache. You must reload Apache configuration file after every change. On Debian and Ubuntu you can run: “/etc/init.d/apache2 reload”.

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