Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links directly to your site. This way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that can develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Since our shared website hosting services feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall include the required code in it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only have to choose the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.