How to do Hotlink Protection in cPanel?

By Gowdham Subramaniam

Hotlink Protection is the simplest way to protect your sites from the other sites. In other words, it helps you to prevent the linking of sites directly to the images and other files on your website.

For example, If I have owned a site and the stranger likes the image and description, then used the URL of the image in their site. When some visitors visit the stranger’s site, the image on my site gets downloaded every time. Thus, there is a huge loss of bandwidth on my site. This is called Hotlink.

To safeguard your site and also to reduce the usage of bandwidth, cPanel provides a tool called ‘Hotlink Protection’.

In this article, we have guided you on how to use the hotlink protection in cPanel.

Enabling Hotlink Protection in cPanel

STEP 1: Login

Login to cPanel of your domain

STEP 2: Hotlink Protection

Navigate to the ‘Security’ section, and click on ‘Hotlink Protection’ under the security section.

STEP 3: Enabling protection

Click ‘Enable’. Now, you have enabled the Hotlink protection for your site.

STEP 4: Allowing URL to access

Under ‘URL’s allow to access domain’. Enter the list of URL’s that can access your site.

STEP 5:  File Extensions

In the ‘Block Direct Access’ box, enter the list of file extensions that you wanted to block direct access.

STEP 6: Direct Requests

After entering the file extensions, click on the checkbox ‘Allow Direct Requests’.

STEP 7: Redirecting request

Another feature in hotlink protection is, you can also Redirect request to the Url in the text box. Users whose sites are blocked will see the page instead of the hotlink file. After that, click on ‘Submit’.

Now, you have successfully enabled the Hotlink Protection. Now, let us see how to disable hotlink protection.

Disabling Hotlink Protection

STEP 1: Hotlink Protection

Under the security section of cPanel, click on Hotlink Protection.

STEP 2: Disable

Click ‘Disable’.

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