Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can appear or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared hosting and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main 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 choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the typical technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.