Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

As our Linux web hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally just two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the necessary code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only have to pick the Internet site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.