How to Add Hotlink Protection to your Website

How to Prevent Hotlinking

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Hotlinking is the act of linking to a file that is hosted on another site, instead of downloading the file and hosting it on your own server. With proper source citation of course.

Images are most frequently hotlinked filetype, but zip, PDF and other digital assets can also be hotlinked.

Since hotlinking requires the website server hosting the file to use its own bandwidth to load it on the offending site, it’s considered bad etiquette. Others go further and call it theft. That’s because it eats up the bandwidth of the site you took it from without giving them the benefit of increased traffic or credit.

In this article I show you how to block others from hotlinking various filetypes from your web server. To spare your server from other undesired traffic, read my article on a list of web crawlers to block.

 

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How to block Facebook crawler

Block Facebook Crawler facebookexternalhit/1.1

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The Facebookexternalhit/1.1 is a user agent used by Facebook to crawl and index web pages for its various services, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

This crawler is responsible for retrieving content, images, and other metadata to improve Facebook’s search functionality and provide users with relevant results.

However, the facebookexternalhit crawling activity can sometimes cause issues for website owners, such as increased server load, bandwidth consumption, and potential security risks.

This article covers why you might want to block facebookexternalhit as well as how to block the facebookexternalhit crawler.

 

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Migrating Site to GoDaddy Basic Managed WordPress

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Recently was not able to convince a client of the benefits of having me professionally manage, host and maintain their website for them. They wanted to save money and use GoDaddy’s Basic Managed WordPress service. So I had to migrate their completed demo over to it but ran into countless errors with GoDaddy’s hosting platform.

The GoDaddy migration tool was useless as was GoDaddy support. GoDaddy support insisted that I upgrade the server in order to complete the migration. But I only had delegated access to the clients account with no ability to purchase said upgrade because the client did not grant me those permissions.

Long story short, I was able to manually migrate their site over, even though we were on the Basic Managed WordPress server using the steps enumerated in this article.

This article is only for my personal use, to help jog my memory if another client want to migrate their site to a more affordable solution. Please do not use this article for migrating any of your or client sites. If you do, you take full responsibility for anything that goes wrong, or right for that matter.

 

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How to Flush DNS Cache Windows

Flushing your DNS on Windows

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Most operating systems will cache (save) IP addresses and other associated Domain Name System (DNS) records in order to fulfill future requests more quickly.

For example, when I visit a website for the first time, my Brave web browser has to ask DNS servers what the IP address is for the requested website. Once it has found this information, my Brave web browser will store it in its local cache and take me to the requested website.

The next time I access that website, my Brave web browser will first check for locally saved DNS records which saves a step by not having to fetch that server IP address again.

When you update the DNS records for your domain name, after transferring to a new hosting provider for example, your local cache needs to be cleared and updated. Otherwise your web browser may continue redirecting you to the old web server address until the DNS propagates throughout the web (usually after 24 hours).

Also, sometimes dangerous IP addresses or corrupted results can be cached along with other issues not mentioned here. Whatever the reason, Windows will allow you to force the process of clearing this cache or “flushing” your DNS. In this article I will show you how to quickly and easily flush your DNS cache on Windows.

 

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Install XAMPP for WordPress Development

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Recently needed to implement a local development environment that used Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.

Years ago I played with WAMP server, which worked well. But the payload was large (1GB installer), system resource utilization high, and it required a number of outdated Microsoft Visual C++ versions to be installed in order to operate correctly. It was also very slow to use but it did work.

Local by Flywheel was slightly better but also very, very slow on a Windows computer. At least in my experience.

By far the best experience has been XAMPP. Granted, you have to run the installer as an administrator as well as its primary executables. But beyond that, it had a smaller installer and opening up a local WordPress installation is at least 4x faster than with Local by Flywheel. In short, for my personal needs the clear winner is XAMPP. Your experience may be different.

Within this article I have instructions and a video covering how I installed XAMPP on my Windows PC for quickly spinning up a WordPress installation for use in WordPress Plugin development.

 

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Manage Your SiteGround Website with SSH

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SSH (Secure Shell) allows us to remotely access a server to configure and install scripts, manage files and folders, plus much more.

This article will show you the commands necessary to manage your website on SiteGround via SSH.

You may want to read my article on how to connect to a SiteGround website using SSH.

 

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Connect to a SiteGround Website Using SSH

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SSH (Secure Shell) allows us to remotely access a server to configure and install scripts, manage files and folders, plus much more.

This article will show you how to use SSH to access a website located on a SiteGround server using an open source tool known as PuTTY.

 

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Website Hosting Services Naples, Florida

Testing Website Transfer on New Host Before Updating DNS

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When migrating a website from one hosting provider to another we can initiate the migration all the way up to the final steps of updating the DNS and installing the SSL certificate.

This would allow us an opportunity to ensure that the migrated site, waiting on the new server, is fully operational (minus the SSL) prior to going live. For example, imagine not setting the database credentials correctly and when the DNS change takes effect you and any visitors are welcomed with a “Database Connection Error“. I call that a “nobueno” situation and now you must hurry to correct the blunder.

 

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Restrict Server Access by IP using Apache .htaccess

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There may be some situations when you want to restrict or redirect your website traffic by IP address. To accomplish this simply add the following lines of code to your website’s .htaccess file (assuming your website is on an Apache webserver):

 

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GoDaddy Pro Sites ManageWP

[FIXED] GoDaddy Prosites Sign in Issues

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Since this morning we have been unable to sign into our GoDaddy Prosites dashboard which we use to manage some web site client accounts. Well, we can sign in but it would immediately revert us to the sign in screen. However, we are able to access our domain names, client accounts and other features. Just not the Prosites, which is the most important part for us.

So we reached out to GoDaddy Customer Support at (480) 463-8387 and went through the process of reporting the issue. We spent close to 40 minutes on the phone with them walking them through the steps to recreate the issue. We even generated a video demonstrating the issue and posted it our YouTube channel for them to review.

While we waited we discovered that the issue was with their “Keep me signed in” feature.

 

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