Protect your downloads by password folder protection.

May 23 2009

Posted by Webmasters-central.com as Internet Marketing

If you are selling digital products online, no matter what you are selling you need to protect your product from illegal accesses and downloads. Digital products can be ebooks, software or scripts etc.

See the URL here:

http://www.yourdomain.com/private/product.zip

Anybody can link to your product from their web sites or they can send your product link to their friends in emails.

What to do to prevent this? Methods are listed here based on security and complexity to use … First few methods are easy to implement but not as secure as later ones.

1. URL of thank you page:

Usually your buyer will be redirected to your web site after purchasing your product. Webmasters usually use thankyou.html page to redirect them to. Don’t use a simple ‘/download/thankyou.html’ page to provide download. thankyou.html is a common word searched by hackers. Use a complicated name to provide the download like BVGf5RDS.html. So people can not guess the name.

2. Change download URL frequently:

Update the download link frequently. Change the name of the file or move to a different directory to make sure the old one is not passed on to others by your buyers.

3. Changing the download file names:

You can also frequently modify your download file name.

4. .htaccess file protection:

Step 4A:
Create a directory called ‘members’ or whatever name you like. Upload your product file to that folder. Upload an index.html to the directory with a link to your download.

Step 4B:
Create a file called htaccess.txt on your computer using notepad.
Copy and paste the following code into it and save it.
(Change the path at line 2 to reflect your web site path)

AuthName “Protected Area”
AuthUserFile /home/path/to/members/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
Require valid-user

Step 4C:
Create a file called htpasswd.txt on your computer using notepad.
Go here:
http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/
Enter a user name and password and click on ‘Create .htpasswd file’ button.
On next page you will see your username and encrypted password sepearated by colon ( : ).
Copy and paste the whole line in your htpasswd.txt file.

Step 4D:
Upload both htaccess.txt and htpasswd.txt file to ‘members’ folder in ASCII mode.
Rename them as .htaccess and .htpasswd respectively.

Step 4E:
Now go to
http://www.yoursite.com/members/index.html
You will get a pop-up box asking username and password.

You can send your buyers these username and password after purchase so they can login and download the product.

This is little more secure. But the disadvantage is all your buyers get only one username and password to login. Not much customization involved.

5. For more secure protection Install a shopping cart and secure downloads: You need software that protects your URLs, product links, password sharing, auto account expirations to maintain your membership area. It should protect your private folders by controlling the accesses to your products.

Free Shopping cart and Autoresonder Cambo: This script stops users access based on ip addresses, number of logins and number of days. It also protects your download urls and files. You can also use .htaccess protection along with its link protection methods. Comes with an integrated follow up autoresponder.