Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which could appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're 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 kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Since our Linux cloud hosting include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party websites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will add the required code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only need to select the website which has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.