Why your .htaccess rule doesn’t work on SiteGround hosting?

I was stuck for a day setting up the .htaccess file on Siteground hosting.
In fact, SiteGround serves the static asset files on top of Nginx to make the website faster. However, one of my .htaccess rules is to protect media files from direct access and it no longer trigger due to NGINX DIRECT DELIVERY.

This is a warning message from SiteGround.

With NGINX Direct Delivery we will serve most of the static resources of your website (images, JS, CSS and others) directly through NGINX to achieve the fastest possible loading time. It works for all kind of applications without additional customisation.

For best results we highly recommend having NGINX Direct Delivery enabled at all times. However, if you need to use custom caching .htaccess rules for your static content you may need to switch it off.

To make my .htaccess rule work as expect, I had to turn off NGINX Direct Delivery option under the speed > caching of SiteGround’s setting.

Make sure to flush the dynamic cache before testing the rule again.

Just sharing the issue and solution what I encountered today. Thanks for reading.