Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links directly to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which may appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. 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 type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the sites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll simply need to pick the website that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.