Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which can appear or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function that we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, since all our Linux cloud web hosting feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this service only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to select the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.