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Hotlink Protection  Print this Article

A hotlink occurs when content from your site is embedded on another site and uses your bandwidth to serve the files. cPanel allows you to prevent hotlinks to your site with the HotLinks Protection feature.

Note: When you disable hotlinks, be sure to allow hotlinks for any necessary domains, such as your website's subdomains and the URL with which you use to access your cPanel account. If the URL you use to access your cPanel account is excluded from the URLs to allow access list, you may not be able to see embedded images in File Manager's HTML editor. For more information about how hotlinks work in the HTML editor, read our HTML Editor documentation.

Enable hotlink protection

To enable hotlink protection, perform the following steps:

  1. Click the Enable on the HotLink Protection interface.
  2. To allow sites to hotlink to your site, add the URL to the URLs to allow access list.
    • You can add certain file extensions to the Block direct access for these extensions list to block direct access to files saved in the specified formats. For example, if you wish to block all .jpg images, add .jpg to the Block direct access for these extensions list.
    • When these file types are blocked, people will not be able to hotlink those types of files from your website, even if hotlink protection is enabled.
  3. Select Allow direct requests to allow visitor to access specific content through the URL. For example, to access example.jpg, a visitor can enter www.example.com/folder/example.jpg as a URL.
  4. To redirect requests for certain content, enter the URL to which you want to redirect your visitor to in the Redirect request to this URL text box.
  5. Click Submit.

Disable hotlink protection

To disable hotlink protection, click Disable on the HotLink Protection interface.

Note: You may delete entries on the URLs to allow access list if you click Disable. To disable access, save the list locally so that you may re-enter it later.

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