Hotlink Protection in cPanel

From Lunarpages Web Hosting Wiki

Hotlink protection allows you to prevent others from linking directly to images or files on your site from their site. Aside from illegally using your images, they would be using up your bandwidth!

• Video Tutorial on How to Activate Hotlink Protection in cPanel

How to Activate Hotlink Protection in cPanel

To get started, login to your hosting account's cPanel. Now that you are at the front page, click on the icon of "Hotlink Protection".

As you can see, hotlink protection is disabled by default. Under the text "Urls to Allow Access:", you should see a large text box where you can list your domain names. Ensure that all variations of your site URL are listed here. Such as:

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com

Also if you have subdomains setup, or addon domains you wish to give access to your images on, be sure they too are also listed in the text box with one URL per line.

The text box next to "Extensions to allow (separate by commas):" is pretty self-explanatory. This is where you would list all of the extensions you would like to allow to be shared with the URLs you listed in the text box above.

As an example, you could put in: jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp

For the "Url to Redirect to:" you can enter the URL to which you would like to redirect anyone who tries to hotlink to you.

Lastly, if you check the box for "Allow direct requests" this means that anybody will be able to view your image by entering the address into the browser.