Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. That way, when 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 which could appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in 2 basic steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally simple - get back to the very same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.