Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links straight to your website. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may appear or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. 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 sort of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.