Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. This way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, 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 enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only have to select the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be created directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.