Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links straight to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that could develop or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud website hosting service and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the conventional way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you shall simply have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any issues even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.