Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a website, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites that are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the regular technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall only need to choose the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the needed file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.