How to do Hotlink Protection in cPanel?

By Arshath | January 9, 2026

Does your bandwidth usage skyrocket without any actual traffic to your websites videos, images and files? Hotlink Protection in cPanel allows you to protect your images and files from being used in any other websites which you do not allow easily.

Let’s check How to do Hotlink Protection in cPanel and allow only your visitors to access the URL of images and files.

What is Hotlink Protection?

Hotlink Protection is a security measure used to protect your images and files being embedding in other website source code or directly in their websites. While Hotlink itself refers when someone use your url in their website code or directly in the browser so the bandwidth usage for those images and files consume on your server taking a load to bring your website down or slow.

To safeguard your site and also to reduce the usage of bandwidth, cPanel provides a tool called ‘Hotlink Protection’.

Let we give you with an example. Hotlinking is when Site B embeds an image directly from Site A’s server (e.g., <img src=”https://sitea.com/cat.jpg”>), consuming Site A’s bandwidth for free. Site A fights this with the protection, checking the HTTP Referer header to block requests from other domains, showing an error instead.

Result: Images only load on Site A’s own pages, saving bandwidth.

Enabling Hotlink Protection in cPanel

Step 1: Login

Login to cPanel of your domain

Step 2: Hotlink Protection

Navigate to the ‘Security’ section, and click on ‘Hotlink Protection’ under the security section.

Step 3: Enabling protection

Click ‘Enable’. Now, you have enabled the it for your site.

Step 4: Allowing URL to access

Under ‘URL’s allow to access domain’. Enter the list of URL’s that can access your site.

Step 5:  File Extensions

In the ‘Block Direct Access’ box, enter the list of file extensions that you wanted to block direct access.

Step 6: Direct Requests

After entering the file extensions, click on the checkbox ‘Allow Direct Requests’.

Step 7: Redirecting request

Another feature of this is, you can also Redirect request to the URL in the text box. Users whose sites are blocked will see the page instead of the hotlink file. After that, click on ‘Submit’.

Now, you have successfully enabled it. Now, let us see how to disable it.

How to Disable Hotlink Protection

Step 1: Under the security section of cPanel, click on Hotlink Protection.

Step 2: Click ‘Disable’.

Hope the information in the article helps you protect your files from being used in any of other websites.