Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that may present themselves or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud website hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the conventional way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you will only need to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.