Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our cloud plans feature a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it offers the very same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily enable the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only have to pick the website that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be generated directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.