Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links directly to your site. That way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that can arise or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Because our website hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you'll just have to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall add the needed code within it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within exactly the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll simply have to pick the site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.