Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, somebody else 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 may simply put links to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only two things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we offer. While the standard technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you will only have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.