Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. This way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that may develop or that somebody could be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites that are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will simply need to pick the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.