Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links directly to your website. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can arise or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all hosting plans we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the Internet sites that are protected within the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.