Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links directly to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection function we provide. While the regular method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you shall only have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.