Hotlink protection is an option to prevent 3rd party websites from sharing specific content from your website directly. This means, that other websites will not be able to share some forbidden content from your website, which could prevent copyright content distribution or simply allows you to avoid some unplanned bandwidth usage.

In order to enable Hotlink Protection in cPanel, follow the guideline:

First, you need to connect to your cPanel dashboard, which you can do by following steps:

1. Log in to your account in our Clients Area: https://billing.hostens.com/clientarea
2. Choose your Web Hosting(cPanel) service;
3. Press the button “Access Control Panel” on the left menu and then the button “Click here to access control panel“.

Choose the “Hotlink Protection” option in the “Security” section. You will be presented with Hotlink protection settings:

Simply pressing the button “Enable” will make Hotlink protection active and others will not be able to link directly to some of your website content, by default, there are a few extensions (jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp) added.

Other options include:

• URLs to allow access – by default, all of your websites are added to Hotlink Protection, but you can delete any of them, by deleting the specific website from this list;
• Block direct access for the following extensions – In this field, you can simply enter any extension, which will be blocked from linking directly to it, if the Hotlink protection is enabled;
• Redirect the request to the following URL – this feature allows you to provide a new URL, which will be used to redirect all the requests from protected links. For example, you could create an additional web page (reject.html), which would simply have some explanation, that the content is not allowed for sharing or some other message.

If you make any of the above changes, you will need to save them by pressing the “Submit” button.