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You may wonder how my Joomla website has been robbed and what has been stolen? If your site has been online for few months, chances are your site has been Hot-Linked by some thieves out there.
What is Hot-Linking?
"Hot-linking is a form of theft where other web sites link directly to the files on your site (such as images or product files) and display them on their own web pages (or link to them for downloading)."
So, why I care about Hot-Linking?
There are certainly a lot of reasons of why hot-linking will hurt your website. More hurts will go to those who are doing business online. Here are a few of the reasons why:
1. Uncontrolled bandwidth consumption.
This is
very important if you're using shared hosting which only provide you
limited bandwidth. In such cases, not only has he stolen your files,
he's also using your server bandwidth to make them show up on his
website. Other web sites linking to your images and files drain your
bandwidth while giving you nothing in return. This costs you money!
2. Your product files have been linked directly.
If
you're selling a product, it may shock you to know that there are many
people who have no qualms about linking directly to your product files
and letting other people download without paying. That's nasty
business. And it gets even more nasty if the site sells embarrassing
products or delivers hate messages or malware. It can even lead to
identity theft.
Can Hot-Linking Be Stopped?
The
answer is YES. If you know how to write the .htaccess file, then you
can simply put the rules in place to stop people from stealing your
bandwidth and products. But it is not only about .htaccess file, it is
more than that.
There's a cool little script I installed the
other day that protect your site from being hot-linked. It will trigger
an email notification when someone is hot-linking to your files.
Moreover, I can even configure the script to send a DIFFERENT file to
the hot-linkers!
I installed the script on my site to test it
out, and it works perfectly! I immediately receive some email reports
letting me know who was stealing my bandwidth. The fun thing is, they
saw different file at their site. That is enough to give honest people
the ability to get off the thief's site FAST and click-over to MY site.
To
protect your downloads, you can redirect your product files (like ZIP
files), too. That way if anybody is fraudulently linking directly to
your product file, you can have those folks get a DIFFERENT file
instead -- perhaps a swapped out PDF or EXE that lets them know they've been ripped off and give them a proper link to the true web site.
I would say the installation can be completed within 5 minutes, as easy as installing Joomla application.
How about you? Do YOU know how other people are using YOUR images and product files?
There's
one sure-fire way to find out in the next few minutes: simply download
and install it, these fantastic new scripts put out by Willie Crawford
and his team.
Does It Work With Joomla?
Actually
the script is considered as a separated application, which does not
modify our Joomla source file except .htaccess. However, you will only
need to add a few lines of codes into the .htaccess. Anyhow, I have
tested it on my Joomla site, with Artio component installed, and it
works perfectly. Does it work with Joomla? Absolutely YES!
I highly recommend it! Here's the link:
http://joomlamarketingtips.com/myreview/protectjoomla.php
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