Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux hosting packages and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function that we offer. While the typical way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you shall only have to pick the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the necessary file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.