LyteByte

Recently Technospot wrote an article on ‘How to stop bandwidth stealing with htaccess file‘. Hotlinking may cost you a lot as it will reduce the actual available bandwidth for you site and as well as if something is hotlinked from a high traffic website, you may lose all your available bandwidth and you may get your account locked. But touching .htaccess file may be little risky if you don’t know the abc’s of htaccess.

However, If you are managing your site through cPanel, then it’s easy to enable Hotlink protection through the cPanel.

How to Enable HotLink Protection through cPanel?

When you login to your cPanel, somewhere in the group of icons you will find the icon for ‘Hotlink Protection‘. Click the icon to enter to Hotlink Protection options page where you can enable the protection.

Options Available Under Hotlink Protection:
1) If you have couple of sites and if you are want to use and hotlink images between these sites then you can list all your websites under the section, ‘Urls to Allow Access‘
2) List all the extension of files that you would like to enable Hotlink Protection. Here you usually list extension of image files but if you are giving away any other products like ebooks then be sure to include their extension too.
3) If you want to enable the viewers to view just the images in the browser then you can activate them.
4) You can setup a redirect URL for all the Hotlinked requests. Maybe you can put an image like ‘I hate Hotlinking’ and redirect all the Hotlinked requests to this image. So instead of loading the actual image, this new image will be shown and I am sure this will be an embarrassment to those website owners.

After you set all these options, make sure you activate ‘Hotlink Protection‘