Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may develop or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may 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 website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared website hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers a simple solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The common way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site which you need to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content inside it. You may also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you may disable it with just one mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.