The wordpress plugin provides an easy and safe way to provide your genuine customers with content, but importantly it's protected against thieves. With WP secureURL activated it gives you encrypted, obfuscated, time-limited URLs.
The plugin can be used with content directly hosted on your site or using Amazon's simple storage service (S3). Both options were added because smaller download files can be hosted on your own server. But for larger files or videos especially, Amazon S3 is perfect as it's very cheap and their servers as you can imagine are also very fast and reliable.
As the name suggests, WP secureURL protects your content urls, and is the ideal solution for a membership site using wordpress.
It protects in 5 ways...
- Ugly URLs - For non-Amazon S3 links, the Secure URLs that this plugin generates are really UGLY! All of the standard link information is replaced with encrypted, obfuscated data.
- Authenticated URLs - Malicious users can't fake these URLs because there is secret information embedded in each link that is authenticated before the link can be executed. This is true for both Amazon S3 and non-S3 URLs.
- Expiring URLs - You can create links that won't work any more after a given time period. So, if someone copies your link and tries to use it after the designated active period - they'll be in for a surprise.
- Referrer Checks - Check to make sure the user is clicking from YOUR WordPress website. There are 2 levels of protection: a "Moderate" level which will catch most abusers and an "Aggressive" check that has even stricter criteria. The WP secureURL's referrer check is configurable with both a global setting and a setting that can be applied to individual links.
Hidden Download Area - For downloads that you host on your own server, your download location is NEVER revealed to the user. So, even if they get past the Ugly, Authenticated, Expiring, Referrer Checked URLs, they still have no idea where your download files are!
And, if that's not enough - get a load of this...
Protect ANY downloadable file ANYWHERE in your WordPress domain - Yep, ANYWHERE! If your WordPress is loaded at www.yourdomain.com then a downloadable file anywhere on site can be FULLY protected with authenticated, referrer checked, expiring URLs and the actual file location will never be seen by the outside world. All of which thieves will really hate when trying to steal your content and look elsewhere for easier picking
