Hi,

I want to know what the purpose is of the Hotlink protection offered on the cpanel?
When should it be enabled?

User won't be able to go by a direct link to you site's subfolder like http://yousite.com/subfolder/somecontentishere/

its so people don't use your images( and your bandwidth ) by directly linking to them from their web pages.

Blogs/ livejournal etc... are big offenders in this area.

hotlink protection tries to stop any referer that doesn't come from your site
from accessing anything thing other than web pages.

say i have a picture called smile.jpg
I can include this in my web page w/ the url . www.mydomain.com/smile.jpg
It will be called from mydomain when you view my page.

If you try to include it in your page by *hotlinking* www.mydomain.com/smile.jpg
it wont show up because the referrer is yourdomain.

Of course you can still save the image and put it on your page
or mungle up the referer so it appears to becoming from mydomain
but this does offer one layer of protection.

I tried using it and it seems to work but it messed up other mod-rewrite pages i have
so i had to blow it off for now.


hopethishelps