Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we offer. While the common method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you shall only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.