Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can appear or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable 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 one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we offer. While the regular method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without problems even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.