How do I prevent hotlinking on Amazon S3 without using signed URLs?

Question

Is there any way I can prevent hotlinking on Amazon S3 without using signed URLs?

Answer 1

Hotlinking is one of the reasons Amazon created Cloudfront. Cloudfront is much much faster to. I did a writeup on it you can look at here.

http://blog.sat.iit.edu/2011/12/amazon-aws-s3-vs-cloudwatch-performance-grudgematch/

edit: S3 and Cloudfront both use the same type of bucket policy to make sure the request comes from the correct url. Cloudfront is still faster though.