Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can 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 CP. The protection can be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection eventually, you could see all of the Internet sites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the conventional method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the required file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.