Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which could appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared website hosting services feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally just 2 clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the required code in it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply have to select the Internet site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be created directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.