Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could arise or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Since our hosting services come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and shall add the needed code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your approval, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll simply need to pick the Internet site that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be set up directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.