Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links directly to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which could present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our cloud website hosting packages and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with just a few clicks. The common way for you to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the website that you intend to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content inside it. You could also use this option for only one folder instead of the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you may deactivate it with one mouse click from the same exact section of your CP.