Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply need to select the Internet site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.