Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that could present themselves or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all web hosting plans we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The common technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to select the Internet site that you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content in it. You can also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may disable it with a single click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.