Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which can develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all of the Internet sites which are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to select the Internet site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.