Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links to your site. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may develop or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection eventually, you could see all the sites that are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - go back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific site and then press the Delete button.