Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your site. This way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may develop or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Since our Linux cloud website hosting packages feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally just two mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll just have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will include the required code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only have to pick the website which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.