Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that could develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux website hosting packages and the only two things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an effective solution to secure your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The standard way for you to turn on server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the website which you want to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content in it. You can even use this function for just one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you could deactivate it with one click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.