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

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature which we offer. While the typical technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you shall only have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without difficulties even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.