Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that can arise or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in two basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort 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 will be able to see all the sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to pick the site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.