Getting HotLink Protection from cPanel
After putting significant time and effort into building your website, you check your web stats and come to find that an unscrupulous webmaster has made you the latest victim of hotlinking. A perfect example of hotlinking would be another site using HTML to display images from your site. Not only are they stealing your data, but precious bandwidth as well. While preventing the theft of your website data is difficult, there is a way to stop people from leaching off your monthly bandwidth.
HotLink Protection
The cPanel control panel is equipped with a useful feature called HotLink protection. As the name implies, this feature prevents other webmasters from directly linking to the files on your site, thus allowing you to save preserve precious bandwidth. This tutorial will show you how to use the HotLink protection feature within cPanel.
Enabling and Configuring HotLink Protection
- From the main page of cPanel, locate and click on the “HotLink Protection” icon under the “Security” category.
On the next page, you will see that the HotLink Protection feature is disabled. Before enabling it, you should review the domains underneath “URLs to Allow Access”. You should see URLs for all the domains you are hosting on the server. Specify the ones you want to have access and move onto the next step.
- In the “Block direct access for these extensions (separate by commas)”, enter the extensions you want to block direct access from. These could be extensions such as jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp, etc.
- To allow direct requests to the image URL from your browser, check the “Allow direct requests” option. This option must be checked when enabling HotLink Protection for files you want to be viewed in QuickTime by your visitors.
- In the “Redirect request to this URL” box, enter the URL you want request for your images to be redirected to.
- Lastly, click the “Enable” tab at the top of the screen or the “Submit tab at the bottom of the screen. Both will provide the same results by enabling the HotLink Protection.
cPanel will give notification that HotLink Protection has been enabled for the specified URLs.
Give it a Try
After making the configurations, you can perform a test to see if the HotLink Protection feature is working. If you don’t have a website located on another server, use MySpace or a similar site that allows you to add images. When trying to hotlink one of your images from another site, you should be greeted by an error message either denying the request or redirected to the URL that you specified in the configuration steps.
Conclusion
Working with the HotLink Protection feature in cPanel is fairly easy. The entire process should take you no longer than a couple of minutes to complete. Keep in mind that this will not prevent people from copying your text or images and uploading them to their server. However, it will protect you from the lazier thieves and most importantly, stop them from stealing your bandwidth.
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1 Response:
# health blog on 26 Sep 2009 at 11:42 am
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