Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that may present themselves or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only two things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only have to select the Internet site that should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.