Easy IO Referrers (Hotlink Protection)

One of the ways to prevent your images from theft and misuse is to restrict traffic based on the 'referer' header that is sent by browsers. This also has the benefit of reducing bandwidth use by sites that "hotlink" your images—that is, they just copy your image URL(s) and use those directly on their own sites.

For sites on the Easy IO CDN, there are three settings available:

Blocked referrers—if you know who is hotlinking your images, you can simply add the domain of their website and future requests derived from their website will be blocked.

Allowed referrers—this is more future-proof as you don't need to know who is hotlinking, you only need to know which domains are authorized. You'll want to enter at least the domain for your own website, and use a wildcard (*) to allow sub-domains that use your images as well, like *.mysite.com

By default, with nothing entered, all traffic is allowed. Once you add any domains to the list, only those domains are allowed, all others will be blocked, with one notable exception. And that leads to the next setting...

Block direct URL/file access—when someone directly accesses an image, the "referer" header will be empty. Likewise, some automated/bot traffic will have an empty referrer. Enabling this setting blocks all of those requests and only permits the request when the referrer matches a host in the Allowed referrers. This may prevent images from being crawled for Google Image Search and similar services.

Manage all these settings and more at https://ewww.io/manage-sites/

*Referrer settings available only on Infinite tier.