Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links straight to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that may present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink security function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will only have to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.