Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links straight to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that may arise or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

As our Linux web hosting packages feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally no more than a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will add the needed code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the exact same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only have to choose the Internet site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be set up straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.