Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links straight to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our shared website hosting plans come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall add the needed code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we offer you. While the standard way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you shall only need to select the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.