Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could develop or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all website hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all the sites which are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to choose the site which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be created straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.