Preventing Hotlinks
Posted: Sat Jan 04, 2025 4:14 am
The concept of hotlinking is very simple. You find an image on the internet and use its URL directly on your site. The image will still appear on your site, but it will be served from the original location. This is essentially stealing, as it uses the bandwidth of the site hosting the hotlink. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can add up to a lot of extra costs. The Oatmeal is a great example. The Huffington Post hotlinked his multi-image cartoon and it ran up a $1,000+ bill.If you are serving your images from a CDN, the setup may be slightly different. Here are some resources with popular CDN providers.
Protecting Hotlinks with KeyCDN
Protecting Hotlinks with Cloudflare
Protecting Hotlinks with MaxCDN
Always make backups
Backups are something that everyone knows is necessary, but isn’t always done. Most of the tips above are security measures you can take to better protect yourself. But no matter how secure your site is, it’s never 100% secure. So you need backups in case the worst happens. Most managed WordPress hosting providers ebay database now provide backups. Kinsta has five different types of backups , including automatic ones, so you can rest easy at night. You can even restore your site with one click.
Backups in MyKinsta.
If your host doesn't have backups, there are several popular WordPress services and plugins you can use to automate this process.
WordPress Backup Services
WordPress site backup services typically have low monthly fees and store your backups in the cloud.
VaultPress (from the Automattic team, now part of Jetpack)
CodeGuard
BlogVault
WordPress Backup Plugins
WordPress backup plugins allow you to receive backups via FTP or integrate them with an external storage source such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive or Dropbox . We highly recommend using an incremental solution as it uses fewer resources.
Duplicator
WP Time Capsule
BackupBuddy
UpdraftPlus
BackUpWordPress
BackWPup
WP BackItUp
Note: We don't allow non-incremental backup plugins on Kinsta servers due to performance issues. But that's because we handle all of this for you at the server level, so it doesn't slow down your WordPress site.
Protecting Hotlinks with KeyCDN
Protecting Hotlinks with Cloudflare
Protecting Hotlinks with MaxCDN
Always make backups
Backups are something that everyone knows is necessary, but isn’t always done. Most of the tips above are security measures you can take to better protect yourself. But no matter how secure your site is, it’s never 100% secure. So you need backups in case the worst happens. Most managed WordPress hosting providers ebay database now provide backups. Kinsta has five different types of backups , including automatic ones, so you can rest easy at night. You can even restore your site with one click.
Backups in MyKinsta.
If your host doesn't have backups, there are several popular WordPress services and plugins you can use to automate this process.
WordPress Backup Services
WordPress site backup services typically have low monthly fees and store your backups in the cloud.
VaultPress (from the Automattic team, now part of Jetpack)
CodeGuard
BlogVault
WordPress Backup Plugins
WordPress backup plugins allow you to receive backups via FTP or integrate them with an external storage source such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive or Dropbox . We highly recommend using an incremental solution as it uses fewer resources.
Duplicator
WP Time Capsule
BackupBuddy
UpdraftPlus
BackUpWordPress
BackWPup
WP BackItUp
Note: We don't allow non-incremental backup plugins on Kinsta servers due to performance issues. But that's because we handle all of this for you at the server level, so it doesn't slow down your WordPress site.