: How to hide website's real address I'm building a website for public use. It's a sharing website - everyone is allowed to download specific content, but I want to make sure nobody knows where

@Dunderdale272

Most servers will allow you to restrict access to the folder itself as not to show all the files inside of the directory. You could throw up an index.html which would prevent it too and then encrypt the name of the file (like vWorker does). That way even if someone knows all the files, they still can't get to them.

If you just want to hide the domain name you could use a CNAME in your DNS and point it to the other domain. If you don't have control over this Amazon Route53 makes it real easy.

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@Cofer257

It sounds to me like your problem is user permissions. It doesn't matter if a user knows where a "file is kept" as long as they can't download it when they shouldn't.

What you need to do is first store the files outside of the web root - for example if your site root is in /var/www/website, store the files in /var/websitefiles. Then on the site link to something like yoursite.com/download.php?file=123 which runs a script/program that gets the file from that websitefiles folder and serves it to the user. The download script can then check user permissions and deny the visitor access if they shouldn't have it.

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@Carla537

Generally, we use proxies (reverse proxies) for this, or we just make the server listen on two domain names. If you don't own the domain you're linking to, you probably aren't allowed to proxy their site through your domain. This sounds to me like a warez or similar site, with which I want nothing to do with.

If you really want to go ahead with the reverse proxy, see another answer of mine:
Point sub directory to another IP?

Just instead of using the IP, use your other domain name, and rather than make an Alias to a subfolder, make the entire VirtualHost listen for your public domain.

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