What Is Hotlink Protection
Hotlink protection prevents someone from directly linking to your website images and using your bandwidth to display images elsewhere. Elsewhere can mean another site that may or may not belong to the person hotlinking.
If enough people hotlink your images it can increase your cost for bandwidth. It can also get your account suspended for exceeding bandwidth limitation. You site may even crash.
Common image files that are hotlinked are jpg, jpeg, gif, png or bmp.
Many webhosts these days provide free hotlink protection.
Configuring hotlink protection is very easy.
- Go to the cpanel in your webhosting account and look under the heading security for “Hotlink Protection”.
- Click on the link
- You should see a button or link to enable or disable
- A place to put all urls that you want to allow access to images
- Note in the allowed urls be sure and place all of your domains and websites to ensure that you are able to display images on your site. If you don’t then you will be blocking your own access also.
- Next decide what images you want to block access usually this would be jpg, jpeg, gif, png and bmp.
- You need only add the extension of the image type followed by a comma in the designated block access box or area.
- You can also allow direct requests. This would be the ability to display images by entering the url of the image file in the browser.
- To test that you have setup hotlink protection correctly go here htaccesstools.com
One important note about hotlink protection; if you have ranked on the search engines for images be sure to include the domains of these search engines in the allowed urls to prevent a sudden drop in website traffic. So be careful.
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