Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your website. This way, each time 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 which can develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

It will not take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the first website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all of our cloud website hosting packages come with a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply need to pick the website that should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file will be created directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.