Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links directly to your 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, along with the copyright issues which may arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. 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 such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud website hosting and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to come back to exactly 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 a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The usual way to enable server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives in it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to choose the Internet site that you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content in it. You could also use this function for only one folder rather than the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you'll be able to disable it with one click through the exact same section of your CP.