Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your site. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact 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 protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in 2 easy steps - choose 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 within a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites which are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The usual way to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the Internet site which you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content within it. You may also use this function for just one folder rather than the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may deactivate it with just one mouse click from the exact same section of your CP.