Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could develop or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our cloud web hosting plans and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink security function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only have to pick the website that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.