Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, 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 own website, they can simply put links straight to your site. This way, when a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared plans and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The usual approach to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the Internet site which you need to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content within it. You may also use this option for only one folder instead of the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you may deactivate it with one click through the exact same section of your CP.