What is hot linking :
Do you heard this word before, probably not or may be yes. When someone link your image of files directly on his website via URL then when someone user load his website in browser so every-time these images and files will be loaded from your server because he mentioned your images URL inside his post/articles/pages etc. This means that, someone is stealing and utilizing your website bandwidth freely.
How to Enable Hotlink Protection:
Hotlink protection is a well efficient feature or tool, which web hosting providers gives to us in our hosting cPanel. If you enable hotlink protection then hotlink protection will stop other website to directly link your website images and files, thus you can save lot of bandwidth and money also. Let’s see, how to enable hotlink protection from cPanel in the following steps.
Step 1:
Login to your hosting cPanel and navigate to ‘Hotlink protection‘ under ‘Security‘ tab.
Step 2:
In this step, at this step we ill configure and enable hotlink protection.
- Add or remove the URL under the list of URLs, on which you want to apply hotlink protection and remove others.
- Secondly, you can add more extensions with conman separate, which files you want to fall under hotlink protection.
- Thirdly, check Allow direct request option.
- Fourthly, after done each setting simply click on ‘Submit‘ button to enable hotlink protection.
See the complete settings and actions in the below image.
Above image clearly expressing the appropriate way to enable hotlink protection from cPanel. After click on ‘Submit’ button, you will automatically redirected to another page. Where you will see a message “You have successfully enabled Hotlink Protection”. Now everything is great and hot linking protection is enabled on selected extensions and website URLs.
Now you have successfully enabled hotlink protection on your target websites. You can edit or change it anytime. This protection will saves your lot of bandwidth, files/images copyright and money.
Let us know, if you think that this article resolve your issue and proved useful for you. We were doing this all stuff and settings on HostGator hosting, doesn’t matter what hosting you are using. As we said, almost every hosting service providing these features and tools to make your hosting server more reliable. Read HostGator hosting features overview. For more discussion and opinions, join us via below comment box.
