Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It will not require more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, due to the fact that all our cloud hosting include a very simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it provides the same exact intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this function only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to choose the site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.