Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to 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 want to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.