Using Hotlink protection in cPanel Control Panel
After investing much time and effort on building a site, verifies the statistics and discover that there are dozens of unscrupulous webmasters who copy your content and are using images hosted on your account of hosting. This is a perfect example of hotlinking. Not only are stealing your images, but also are consuming traffic of your business web hosting. While preventing theft articles is difficult, there is a way to get other webmasters cannot use images hosted on your website hosting account.
Hotlink Protection
The cPanel control panel is equipped with a useful feature called Hotlink protection. As the name implies, this feature helps to prevent other webmasters linking directly to files hosted on your site, saving traffic and improve site performance. In this article we will teach how to enable this type of protection.
Enabling and Configuring Hotlink protection
Enter the cPanel control panel and look for the icon named “Hotlink Protection”, which is in the security category. On the next page you have to enable hotlink protection functionality and introduce sites that want to use the extensions (normally are: jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp).
We also recommend that you allow direct access to the image, because sometimes you can have small images, in which clicking on the link that makes up the image you have access to the full size image.
The option of “Redirect request to this URL” we recommend you place the URL of a web page that shows a simple warning that it is not allowed to use images hosted on your web hosting account. So you will inform others webmasters to not to waste time trying to use your stuff.
Try now!
After you enable and configure, you can perform a test to check the functionality of Hotlink Protection whether it is working or not. If you do not have a website hosted on another web server, you can use Myspace, Blogger or another site to try to use images that are hosted in your account. When trying to hotlink one of the images hosted on your site, you will not see the error message saying that you cannot access the image, because it is protected or the user will be redirected to the URL you specified above.
Conclusion
Working with Hotlink protection is relatively simple using cPanel. The whole process takes no more than a few minutes to complete. Keeps in mind that this will not prevent other webmasters to copy your text or images to upload to your own web server. However, it will help protect your web hosting account and more importantly, stop them from stealing bandwidth from your site.
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