Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that can present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our cloud hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.