Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which could present themselves or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared website hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is as simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the given website and then press the Delete button.