How to manage hot linking on your website

Hot linking can be a big issue if you have high definition images or video. Without Hot Link protection, the content can be shown on other websites burning through your bandwidth and hiding where it is from so you don’t even get credit for it. This also can be an issue with your content being used at places you don’t want it to be. Blocking Hot Linking is very easy with the Hot Link protection tool in your cPanel shown here.

The issue though can be that you have some images like banners or video you want to have hot linked. This is why we suggest adding a sub domain called hotlink.your-main-domain.com (replace your-main-domain.com with your actual domain name in this case). This also helps you manage your stats better because you would show visitors that are really just seeing your content that is on another site if linked from your main site. By having all your hot linked content on the sub domain, your stats will only show the true information from visitors on your website.

Once you have the sub domain set up, you’ll want a separate FTP account or use the file manager to add the content to be hot linked. I use Filezilla normally, so in that program you can easily have multiple FTP account connections. Now any content you upload into the hot link sub domain you can link to directly from the URL hotlink.your-main-domain.com (replace your-main-domain.com with your actual domain). A link to an image like this would be https://hotlink.your-main-domain.com/image.jpg for example. Make sure and use the https:// in front so the link does not trigger SSL security errors.