Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that may appear or that somebody could be trying to trick people into believing 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 prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Because our shared hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will include the required code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to pick the site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.