Hotlinks: Enabling And Disabling Hotlink Protection Print

Hotlinks: Enabling And Disabling Hotlink Protection

Hotlink protection keeps other websites from using your bandwidth by directly linking to files or pictures hosted on your website. If an image on your site is directly linked to on another website, when their website loads it will be pulling the image from your server, using your bandwidth.

Configuring Hotlink Protection in cPanel

1. in cPanel, click "HotLink Protection".
2. Ensure that your protected domain is in the field labeled "URLs to allow access". If you have addon domains, make sure they are listed as well.
3. In the field titled "Block direct access for these extensions", enter the file extensions that you would like to block hotlinking on (such as .jpeg, .bmp, .pdf, etc)
4. Check the box labeled "Allow direct requests".
5. Click "Submit".

Note: If your images stop working, you may need to make sure the allowed URLs match the way images are called for in your HTML. Some programs use the full name rather than the relative path.

Note: Some firewalls block a referrer variable for addition privacy for users. Hotlink will eventually identify visitors with blocked referrer variables as illegitimate requests and block them. This is an issue with Hotlink Protection that is not currently resolvable. As such, we recommend using Hotlink Protection only when necessary.