Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may develop or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The standard technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to choose the site which you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content within it. You may also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be enabled, you can disable it with a single click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.