Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that could present themselves or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our cloud plans and the only two things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main Internet 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 deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The common way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply need to choose the website which you intend to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content in it. You can also use this feature for only one folder instead of the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one mouse click through the same section of your Control Panel.