Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can develop or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Since our cloud plans include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall include the necessary code in it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink protection function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll simply have to select the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.