Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that may present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud packages and the only 2 things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide a simple solution to secure your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard way to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia CP, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the website that you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content within it. You may also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be enabled, you'll be able to deactivate it with one click via the same section of your Control Panel.