It takes a lot of time and effort to correctly build a website, and finding out that someone is undermining
your hard work simply by stealing bandwidth from your web server can be a very frustrating experience. Of
course, you’ll want to do everything in your power to prevent such an occurrence, as it can greatly impact the
efficiency and overall performance of your website. One way to keep bandwidth thieves from stealing the server
resources that you pay for is by using HotLink protection in cPanel.
What is HotLink Protection?
Usually, when someone is stealing your bandwidth, they are doing so simply by HotLinking an image from your
site. With HotLink protection, you can prevent other webmasters from using your bandwidth by Hotlinking. It
does this by replacing the desired image with the image of your choice. For example, you can have it display
an image that states something like “ This image belongs to another site “your site”, please visit “your
site’s url.com” to see the original image.” This will redirect the viewer to your site, not only gaining you
more traffic, but also keeping your bandwidth usage in check.
Try Asking First


Instead of using the Hotlink protection outlined below, you could also try emailing the webmaster to see if
they will cooperate. If they don’t cooperate, or send you a nasty email in response, you could always place a
defacing or irrelevant image in place of the image they are HotLinking from your site. That way their visitors
will be less inclined to visit their site again. However you decide to use it, the HotLink protection tool in
cPanel will let you control the Hotlinking that goes on with your images.
Uploading Your Replacement Image
To begin setting up protection, simply click on the HotLink icon in your cPanel main interface. Usually the
protection will be disabled by default. First we are going to upload the image that we would like to replace
the bandwidth thieves image with. We need to upload it to another domain or image hosting service, since it
will not be displayed if it is on our server, since our HotLink protection (once activated) will prevent any
image on our server from being displayed. Try hosting the replacement image on a free image hosting service
online. Make sure your image is viewable before proceeding to the following step.
Setting Up HotLink Protection
The first thing you want to do after you have enabled Hotlink Protection, is add the site that you would
like to allow HotLinking to, such as your partner sites or your other domains. Now that you have done this,
you’ll need to enter the URL of the replacement image that we uploaded in the last step. Then check the box
that says “Allow Direct Requests.” Checking this option will let you HotLink to your own images without
problems. Finally click on the “Activate” button. If you did everything correctly, you will see a message that
tells you HotLinking protection is active.

This Article was submitted by Recon Hosting - If you found it useful, please consider them as your host