Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that may arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Since our shared website hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Furthermore, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and will add the necessary code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside the very same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The standard way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the Internet site which you need to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content in it. You can also use this feature for just one folder instead of the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you can deactivate it with just one click from the same exact section of your CP.