Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux shared hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. In addition, you may also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will add the needed code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only need to choose the website which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.