Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your site. This way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which can appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It won't take more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we offer you even if this is the first hosting account that you use, as all our Linux cloud packages feature a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will simply need to choose the website that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.