Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which may present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud web hosting services and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an effective solution to protect your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the Internet site that you would like to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content inside it. You may also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with a single mouse click from the same exact section of your CP.