Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a site, another person 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 may simply put links to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may arise or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared web hosting and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an effective solution to shield your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The conventional way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives in it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site that you intend to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content in it. You can even use this option for only one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you can deactivate it with a single click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.