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

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

As our cloud hosting plans come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to shield your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and shall add the required code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the common way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only need to choose the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even if you have never used any hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.