Bluehost Web Hosting Help

Hotlink Protection Setup

Summary

To protect your images or other files from being hotlinked on another website, you may use Hot Link Protection. Hotlinking is the use of an image of file on another server by pulling the source image from the original server. This uses the bandwidth of your Bluehost account. It appears as though your images are on the other website even though the source is pulling from your Bluehost account. Hotlink protection stops this type of leeching or bandwidth theft.

Using HotLink Protection

Using HotLink Protection

Setting up Hot Link Protection is easy by using the Hot Link Protection tool built into the cPanel.

How to setup Hot Link Protection:

Log in to your Bluehost cPanel account.
Under the Security section, click the Hot Link Protection icon.

Fields

URLs to Allow Access- Enter the URLs you want to give access to the restricted files. Make sure you enter these with and without the www's if you want the images to be accessed both ways.

Block direct access for these extensions- Enter the file extensions you want to block access from sites not listed in your, URLs to Allow Access, list.

Allow direct requests- Check this if you want to allow people to be able to access restricted files by entering the path/URL into the browser.

Redirect request to this URL- If you do not have direct requests enabled, by entering a URL here this will redirect people if they enter the URL of the file directly into the browser.

Knowledgebase Article