Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could arise or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Because our Linux cloud hosting packages provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you may also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the necessary code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you may easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only have to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.