Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could arise or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are 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 could permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If required, you'll also have the option to activate the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as effortless - return to the same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.