Guide to prevent hotlinking images on Apache server
Hotlinking is the process of stealing someone’s website bandwidth by directly adding assets from one website to another. These assets can be images, videos, or audio. The other websites embed your images, videos and audio by copying the HTML code.
If your website is hosted on an Apache server then you can follow these simple steps to enable hotlink protection on an Apache server is easier than you might think.
Open the .htaccess file in your root directory of the Apache server and add the following code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?bing.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yahoo.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|svg)$ https://dropbox.com/hotlink-placeholder.jpg [NC,R,L]