Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the typical method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can perform this automatically and you'll only need to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.