Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your website. That way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can arise or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Since our cloud website hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.