Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that can appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, 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 site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you can see all the Internet sites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel 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 can use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - go back to the same section, check the box next to the given website and then click on the Delete button.