Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function which we provide even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, as all of our Linux cloud packages include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to protect your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with several clicks. The standard technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives in it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the site which you intend to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content in it. You can also use this function for only one folder rather than the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be active, you can deactivate it with a single mouse click via the same section of your Control Panel.