Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that can develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Since our shared website hosting plans provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally just two mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the necessary code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the exact same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only have to choose the Internet site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.