Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, somebody else 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 straight to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that could develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may 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 site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It will not take more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we offer you even if this is the 1st hosting account that you use, because all our Linux cloud hosting services come with a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this function only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually inside the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will simply need to choose the Internet site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.