Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may arise or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Because our hosting include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will include the necessary code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the common way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you'll only have to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.