Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could arise or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as simple - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the given website and then press the Delete button.