Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that may arise or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all cloud hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the sites that are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we provide. While the regular way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only have to pick the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.