Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build an Internet site, 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 Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that may appear or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your 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 such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the websites that are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is as simple - return to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.