Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, someone else 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 can simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't require any computer programming skills 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 disable the protection at some time, you can see all the Internet sites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to pick the site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.