Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which may appear or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux website hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function we offer. While the regular technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you'll only need to select the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the necessary file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.