Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, 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 Internet site, they may simply put links to your website. That way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which may develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP 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 websites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only need to choose the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be generated directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll only have to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.