Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links directly to your website. In this 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 issues that may arise or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

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

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the regular technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you shall simply have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.