Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which could arise or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It will not take more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the 1st web hosting account that you use, because all of our shared website hosting plans feature a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this feature only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers a simple solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with a few clicks. The conventional way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the website that you want to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content within it. You can also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you can deactivate it with a single click via the same section of your Control Panel.