Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could arise or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. 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 Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our Linux cloud web hosting feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Furthermore, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will add the needed code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only have to pick the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be created straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.