Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting packages we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites that are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we offer. While the common technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you'll only have to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.