Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your website. That way, each time 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 may arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer a simple solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The standard technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the Internet site that you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content inside it. You could also use this feature for only one folder rather than the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you may disable it with a single click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.