Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links straight to your site. That way, each time 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 issues that could arise or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. 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 may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting packages we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this kind of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the websites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will only have to choose the website that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.