Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which could develop or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all web hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites which are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be created straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.