Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could arise or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, 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 Hosting

We provide an effective solution to protect your content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual technique to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the site which you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content inside it. You may also use this option for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you may disable it with one click via the same section of your CP.