Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which can present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared website hosting and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to select the website that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be set up directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.