Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could present themselves or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be turned on in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply have to pick the Internet site which has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.