How to Prevent HotLinking

Hotlinking is the use of any files (especially images) hosted on your site and posted on another site. This is technically called bandwidth theft because traffic on the offending site uses up your own bandwidth to serve the files/images.

Here’s a simple way to prevent hotlinking using your cPanel:

* Click on the HotLink Protection button on the home page.

* Enter any other addresses that you will allow to access your site other than the provided defaults in the central area.

* Enter the protected extensions in the Extensions to allow field. Make sure you separate each extension with a comma.

* Enter the address to redirect any hotlinking to in the Url to Redirect to field.

* Click on the Allow direct requests tick box if you want to allow direct URL access to non-HTML files, such as images.

* Click on the Activate button. You’re done!

Add comment September 2nd, 2008