Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which may present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our cloud website hosting and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.