What is HotLink Protection?
HotLink protection will prevent all web sites that are not specified in the Allowed Domains list from accessing any files listed in your Protected Extensions list. Web sites listed in your Allowed Domains list will be able to access all file extensions on your site. HotLink protection also will disable a viewers ability to enter the URL to a file with a protected extension into their browser directly.
For example: If I found out that somesite.com was linking an image on their main page to http://mysite.com/image.jpg, I could turn on HotLink protection to prevent somesite.com from using my image. This will not stop them from saving your images.
Why should I use HotLink Protection?
Whenever someone accesses a file from your site, it transfers data to that person. This data transfer is counted against your bandwidth usage limit (check the Stats tab to see your bandwidth usage). Other sites may choose to link to your images. Not only can this use up your bandwidth, it can also cause copyright issues, or other problems. If you do not wish for other sites to be able to link to your images, zip files, or other files, you should enable HotLink protection.
Configuration
You can add or remove the domains that can access all your files by typing in the field beneath Allowed Domains.
Add the specific file extensions you wish to prevent outside access to in the blank field next to Protected Extensions.
You can send a viewer to a specific URL if the site the are viewing is linked to a protected extension by entering that URL in the blank field next to Url to Redirect to:. This can send them to a page that says something like "Stealing bandwidth is not nice!" or to a simple error page.
