Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links directly to your website. That way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that could develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Since our Linux shared hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will add the necessary code within it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only need to choose the Internet site which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be generated directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.