Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that could arise or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to select the website which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be created directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.