Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that may develop or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, 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 can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.