Customer Services and Complete account management

In Cpanel there is an icon labeled as "Hotlink Protection" within the security section, click on this where you will find 3 boxes.

These are:

Urls to Allow Access
Extensions to allow
(seperate by commas)
Url to Redirect to

In the first box on top, enter any and all URLs which will be allowed to hotlink the images on your website, this includes your own website if you are using absolute URL's in your web pages as links to images or video files.

Now, in the second box enter all the extensions that sites will be able to hotlink to, the default extensions are .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, and .bmp but you an also use .* to block hotlinking to any file at all as a wildcard.

Once you have done this, enter the URL which sites that attempt to hotlink off you without protection will be re-directed to.

Lastly, click on the button labeled as Activate. Upon doing so this will take you to a new page telling you that hotlink protection has been enabled with a list of all sites that have access.

Critical note:

Hotlink protection will write its own code to your root directory .htaccess file, so if you are using any custom .htaccess file such as URL re-writing, ensure you have a backup of your .htaccess file as the hotlink protection will break the .htaccess file, but this can easily be undone by locating the new hotlink protection code in the .htaccess file, then enter it into the very bottom of your custom .htaccess file and re-upload.

Add to Favourites

Print this Article