Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which can arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple 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 give you a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will 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 Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to protect your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The usual approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the site that you would like to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content in it. You can also use this function for just one folder rather than the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you may deactivate it with one mouse click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.