Protecting your website’s files from hotlinking is essential for preserving bandwidth and securing your content, and cPanel makes this process straightforward. Hotlinking occurs when other sites link directly to your images, videos, or other files, causing them to load on external pages without your permission, which can drain resources and slow down your site.
With cPanel’s built-in hotlink protection, you can quickly set restrictions to block unauthorized websites from accessing and displaying your files. This guide will walk you through the steps to enable hotlink prevention on cPanel, helping you safeguard your content, reduce bandwidth theft, and maintain optimal website performance.
Start by logging into your Sangkrit.net account and then launch your hosting’s cPanel
Scroll down to ‘Security’ section and click ‘HotLink Protection’ icon.
This will direct you to a page showing you option for enabling and disabling hot links. By default it provides you a list including all domains and URLs of your websites where you can turn on hotlinking.
The list is editable, you can manually include or exclude domains and URLs to prevent hot links. It also provides you a text area to block access for selected file types and extensions like .jpg, .png etc.
The last text field allows you to redirect hotlink requests to a custom URL, may be your website’s home page or whatever you like.
If you are running your website over WordPress then you may also try Hotlink Protection plugin which is an easy step script coded to stop others from stealing images from your website. Another plugin called Hot Link Prevention offers you a tick-mark option to prevent images from hotlinking.