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

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You do not need any programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some point, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply need to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be created straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.