Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that can appear or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared website hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the websites that are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.