Easiest Way To Protect Your Website Resources From Hotlinks & Direct Links

Hotlinks, also called “hotlinking” or “direct linking,” lets a website to show images or other media that are hosted on another server without even uploading the content to its own server.

It is the practice of embedding or linking to media files such as images, videos, etc hosted on a website and linked by another website, without any permission of the owner.

These links use the resources of the website where these files are actually hosted because the hot links display the file without hosting it on their server so the resources of the main server are consumed whenever the webpage containing such files are viewed.

The only positive aspect of hotlink is easy sharing and the negative aspects are bandwidth theft and legal issues. To protect against hotlinking, website owners at Sangkrit.net may simply use hotlink protection on their cPanel Webhosting, Webhosting Plus, VPS, and Dedicated Server.

Login to your SANGKRIT.net Account, then visit ‘My Products’ page and open the cPanel of the account on which you want to enable the hotlink protection.

1. On cPanel, scroll down to the ‘Hotlinks’ button and click it.
2. Click ‘Enable’ and a new interface will open and display the Allowed referrers and Protected extension lists.
3. Click Go Back.
4. To allow specific sites to hotlink to your site, add their URLs in the URLs to allow access menu.
5. To block direct access to files of specific types, add those file extensions to the Block direct access for the following extensions text box.
6. For example, to block all .jpg images, add .jpg to the Block direct access for the following extensions text box.
7. When you block these file types, others cannot hotlink to those types of files from your website regardless of any other settings.
8. To allow visitors access to specific content through the URL, select the Allow direct requests checkbox. For example, if you enable this setting, a visitor could enter http://www.example.com/folder/example.jpg as a URL to access the example.jpg file.
9. To redirect requests for certain content, enter the URL to which you want to redirect your visitor in the Redirect the request to the following URL text box.
10. Click ‘Submit’.

You can anytime disable the hotlink protection by clicking the ‘Disable’ button. But as you click Disable, the system will delete the entries in the List of URLs. So it might be better for you to save the list locally before you disable hotlink protection.