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

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create 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 that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites which are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be generated straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.