I have made a few posts here the past few days while trying to figure out a solution to my problem. I offer radio stations, djs, and members of the press mp3's to download of new artists singles to play on there station etc in all versions in high quality format. The problem is right now i have the files hyperlinked and need them to only be available on my website so people cant hotlink them onto forums and their websites etc. I heard that there is a way where you can make the files only able to be downloaded when coming from your website such as they have to be on your domain when clicking the file. Is this possible?
You can direct them to your page and use a flash player, of course the swf can be dl'ed still but this will still help alot for what you're doing.
yeah the files need to be downloaded easy and i think a swf file will make it alittle less user friendly. Is there not a way that they can only download link if it comes from my website such as they have to be on www.name.com to download www.name.com/file.mp3 to download it. Or if there is an easy way to make it so they cant see the path easily of the file.
Hi, I can design a player that decrypts encrypted link on the fly and thus there wont be any links inside of it, this will certainly make the job of getting the links and downloading your files a nasty one. Regards.
Many ISPs offer anti-hotlink protection, which you can enable in CPanel. Try looking in CPanel or asking your ISP/checking their help files. Also, most forum software can be set up to require you to be logged in to download attachments. You can use this.
What language is your site in? This is absolutely doable in Cold Fusion. I would suspect PHP and others as well. Also consider Amazon S3. Using their API you can make a file available for a specified time-period. Amazon handles the link encryption and time-out for you and the storage is really inexpensive. This may also be a solution to your issue as well.
yeah i thought the anti hotlink would do the job but GoDaddy doesnt have that option and didnt even have it available to buy I dont know why. Is there a way I could still get this onto my server somehow?
You could protect your links by adding them to a members only section that you have to be logged in to access
yeah already have a section where they must log in but since I just put up the links to it all they could easily steal the links from there and use them other places such as for streaming on their websites or to post on message boards that share music etc, trying to stop that from happening but since go daddy doesnt have hotlink protection in their cpanel and won't help me at all with that I am trying to find a very easy way to make it work or if there is a way I could just track to make sure all of my links are staying on my page and no one else has hotlinked them but it is hard when so many people on message boards put it in quotes and make people copy and past into browser to get it
can I add it onto my Cpanel somehow or onto my server somehow for hotlink protection or since go daddy doesnt have it I can't get it on my hosting I have now?
http://altlab.com/htaccess_tutorial.html Was just reading this article does anyone think this would work for my problem, wanting to get experts advice before I start messing with my htaccess file
What about using a login system then requiring that they be logged in to download the file? I think this could be done without too much work.
I am using a customized version of phpbb which I am looking at a mod to do that which I may use, this will probably be my best bet because I checked more about the hta access and it seems there are many problems that outweight the postivies