Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that could present themselves or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites which are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is as simple - return to the same section, check the box alongside the given website and then click on the Delete button.