Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which can present themselves or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our web hosting and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to shield your content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with just a few clicks. The conventional way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the Internet site which you intend to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content within it. You can even use this function 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'll be able to deactivate it with a single click from the same section of your Control Panel.