Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, someone 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 may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which could present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet 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 in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we provide. While the common way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you shall simply have to select the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the required file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.