Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, someone 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 may simply put links straight to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which may appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Because our cloud website hosting service come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall include the necessary code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll only have to choose the site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.