Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links directly to your website. In 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 problems which could arise or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all the sites that are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the typical way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can do this automatically and you shall only have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.