Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that may develop or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we provide. While the conventional method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you shall only need to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without difficulties even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.