Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a 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 own website, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that could appear or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared hosting plans and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will 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 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 protection function, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to pick the website which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be created directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.