Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight to your website. In this way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will simply have to select the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file will be created directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.