Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that may present themselves or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux cloud website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should 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 manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the regular way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you will only need to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.