Protect Your Cloud Files CDN Bill from Unexpected Usage

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When choosing to use the content delivery network (CDN) to
accelerate your website and the images and videos on that website, you
are responsible for all bandwidth costs associated with delivery of your
content over the public Internet, including bandwidth incurred because
of piracy. This article is designed to help you monitor and
protect your CDN usage.

When you use the CDN, all your assets are assigned a CDN URL. Your
website then has that CDN URL in its source code and displays it
when a user requests to see it. Some companies and
individuals target websites' asset URLs and serve them without the site
owner's permission. This is known as "hot linking" and can
result in a massive increase to your CDN bill if the problem goes
unnoticed.

You can protect yourself, your content, and your invoice from hot
linking in the following ways:

Constant monitoring and alerts for abnormal CDN bandwidth usage
Proactive measures to make it more difficult to access your site's
source code

Monitor usage in the Cloud Control Panel

One way to monitor your current CDN usage is through the Cloud Control
Panel.

Log in to the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel.
In the top navigation bar, click Select a Product > Rackspace Cloud.
In the upper-right corner of the panel, click on your username and select
Usage Overview.

On the Current Usage page, you can see the service usage for all of
your Rackspace products and services.
Next to any service, click the down arrow for more information about
how you are using your services. If you are using multiple Rackspace
Cloud products, you might need to scroll down to find your Cloud
Files usage.

Examine CDN logs

Another method for monitoring your CDN usage is by examining the CDN
logs. Every CDN customer can turn on CDN logs for their containers that
are CDN enabled. If you find that your content has been hot linked, you
can use your CDN logs to find which URLs are compromised and take action
immediately. You can also enable these logs via the Cloud Files API or
from the Cloud Control Panel by
performing the following steps:

In the top navigation bar, click Storage > Files.
Click the gear icon next to the container for which you want to
enable CDN logs, and select Enable Logs.

After you have enabled CDN logs for your content, Cloud Files creates a
container for you and delivers logs to that container. The frequency of
log delivery can vary depending on how heavy traffic is on the CDN, but
logs are usually delivered every four hours.

The log files inside of the .CDN_ACCESS_LOGS container will be
prefixed with the name of the container they are logging, followed by
the date and time stamp. This makes it easy to find logs for a specific
time period.

Third-party log analysis

Several companies in the market will take the hassle out of parsing the
logs in your CDN log container. These companies take the raw logs that
Rackspace delivers to your account and make them easy to consume and
understand. For example, they will show you peak traffic times and
geographic regions that access your data the most.

For monitoring purposes, most of these tools allow you to set up alerts
to indicate when usage reaches a certain level, or if it has increased
by a certain amount. This is a great way to get monitoring without
having to code a solution yourself.

Hide source code

Although completely hiding your source code is impossible, following are
some common tools that can serve as a first line of defense against
those trying to steal content. Although someone with more technical
knowledge will find ways around these defenses, it might take long
enough for them to give up.

No right-click scripts

There are scripts that will prevent visitors from using the right-click
menu to copy your content's link or view your site's source code.
Although there are other ways to find this information, preventing
right-click access can be an easy first step to protecting your site.
If you attempt this method, be sure to check its functionality in a
variety of browsers, because the code can be difficult to implement
across all of them.

JavaScript encryption

The method involves taking your code, using a custom-made function to
"encrypt" it, and then putting it in an HTML file along with a function
that will decrypt it for the browser. While website visitors will still
be able to view your source code, they will not be able to use it
without decrypting. There are several tools online that will help
encrypt your source code. Here are some links and examples that might
be helpful:

This method requires the use of JavaScript, meaning that you need to
expect your legitimate website traffic to be using browsers and settings
that support it.

Updated 12 months ago