Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a website, someone 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 own site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which could present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only two things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.