Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which could arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the standard way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you will only have to choose the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the necessary file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without difficulties even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.