Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links straight to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the regular way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you shall only have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.