Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images that 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 site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared website hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the sites which are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to enable the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the given site and then press the Delete button.