How to Disable Hotlink for images

[refface]

Is there a way to disable hotlink for images? Please advise. Thanks

 

[ddotgrass]

Not sure why you'd want to do that for an image hosting site?

But you can add this to your .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]

 

[Rodolfo]

Not sure why you'd want to do that for an image hosting site?

Because that is perhaps the most important source of high usage and some websites can't handle it. In the other hand, everybody should ban certain IP ranges directly at server level to avoid denials of service caused by layer 7 attacks.

 

[ddotgrass]

Because that is perhaps the most important source of high usage and some websites can't handle it. In the other hand, everybody should ban certain IP ranges directly at server level to avoid denials of service caused by layer 7 attacks.

Yeah, I'm aware of what image hotlinking does, but it kind of defeats the object of an image hosting site. Just seems a bit silly, as well as the fact that servers nowadays come with so much data, this should never really be a problem. Unless you're serving millions of views a day, and wherever the image is linked is getting millions of views a day.

 

[Rodolfo]

Is a problem when people abuse your website which happens to everybody at certain point. That's why I'm doing an IP banning system for 3.5.14

 

[refface]

ddotgrass & Rodolfo

Thanks for your valuable input. Much appreciated. Thanks