Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud web hosting services and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated 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 choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function we provide. While the regular way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.