Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links straight to your site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. 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 such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all website hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all the Internet sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll simply need to select the site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.