Tag: "htaccess"

How to secure your WordPress installation

By on Apr 13, 2010 in Web Hosting

Yesterday, news sources and blogs announced that WordPress blogs hosted by Network Solutions were being hacked. The website owners’ credentials were stolen, and then the sites were used to redirect thousands of visitors to websites that distributed malware. Apparently, WordPress’ configuration file, called wp-config.php, stores the user’s database password in plain text. Even still, attackers [...]

Change a URL with mod_rewrite

By on Apr 08, 2010 in Web Hosting, Web servers

Question: My current website URL looks like http://mydomain.com/index.php?page=creative. How can I remove the index.php and question mark to make it look more like a regular page address? Answer: If your web server is Apache, you should be able to do this with mod_rewrite. If you have a shared hosting account, first make sure that your [...]

How to prevent hotlinking

By on Apr 07, 2010 in Web Hosting

Also known as inline linking, hotlinking occurs when someone else uses a picture or video from your site somewhere else on the web, but doesn’t bother to host the content themselves. These “free riders” can hog precious bandwidth and in some cases, cause server instability. Fortunately, hotlinking is very easy to prevent. A number of [...]

How to redirect a specific IP address

By on Mar 24, 2010 in Web servers

Question: How do I redirect every visitor to my website except for me? Answer: There are two methods you can use to accompany the results you want and both involve using an .htaccess file. The first is to redirect your site’s visitors with standard Apache directives: ErrorDocument 403 http://www.yourdomain.com Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow [...]

Forcing a browser to prompt to save certain files

By on Mar 24, 2010 in Web servers

Question: I am distributing sensitive forms to my clients and want to make sure they download them rather than opening them in their browser. Is there a way to force the web server to prompt them for download rather than using a browser plugin? Answer: Yes, using .htaccess you can force most browsers open a [...]

How do I block clusters of IP addresses?

By on Mar 22, 2010 in Security, VPS & Dedicated

Question: How do I block clusters of IP addresses? Answer: Although we previously illustrated a method of blocking single IP addresses using an .htaccess file, it is important to know a few things. 1. Many hackers use proxies and other methods to use fake IP addresses. Blocking the one they have faked might actually block [...]

How to set cookie expiration in Apache

By on Jan 21, 2010 in Web Hosting, Web servers

Cookies are very important for dynamic websites. They allow you to set parameters for user interaction. With cookies, your website can remember visitors and show them appropriate data, ads, and even specific pages. By default, cookies only last for a single browser session. With the CookieExpires Apache directive, you can set the length of time. [...]

How to use Apache to deny access to certain directories

By on Jan 11, 2010 in Security, Web servers

In the past, we explained how to deny access to a file or directory with the allow/deny Apache server directive. There are, however, two other ways to do it that may be more to your liking. The allow/deny directive displays the 403 Forbidden page or whatever you have in its place. This might not be [...]

How to disable hidden files in ProFTPD

By on Dec 25, 2009 in Software, VPS & Dedicated, Web servers

Question: How do I disable the viewing of hidden files in ProFTPD so that my clients can’t see them? Answer: It is fairly easy to conceal hidden files in ProFTPD, but before you do, you should be aware of the consequences. Users will not be able to see their own .htaccess and .htpasswd files, which [...]

Deny Access to Any Files

By on Nov 23, 2009 in Web Hosting, Web servers

Question: I have a set of files on my website with the extension .rpc. They are financial files, and I want to make sure that no one can access them from the web. Can i do that? Answer: On an Apache server, you can do just about anything, and .htaccess files make a lot of [...]

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Tag: "htaccess"

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