Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links directly to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection eventually, you could see all of the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given website and then press the Delete button.