Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared services and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an effective solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The usual technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the site which you want to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content within it. You can even use this option for only one folder instead of the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may deactivate it with one click through the same section of your CP.