A hotlink occurs when someone embeds content from your site in another site and uses your bandwidth to serve the files. Hotlink protection prevents other websites from directly linking to certain files (typically images) on your website. You'll want to prevent this if you have copyrighted images, or to simply save on bandwidth usage.
- Click the Hotlink Protection icon.
- You'll first want to make sure your own sites are listed here, so you are able to hotlink to your images.
- Enter all the file types you want to protect...
- ... and check the Allow direct requests box if you want to give the ability to manually enter URLs of a protected file.
- Enter the URL you want to redirect to, for anyone who tries to hotlink to your files or images.
- Then click Submit.
That's it! You've successfully enabled hotlink protection.
To disable hotlink protection, click the Disable button.