Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links directly to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that may present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very time and effort saving tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux cloud packages and the only two things which you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily switch on the hotlink security function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will simply have to pick the website which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be generated directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.