Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux hosting packages and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to secure your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with several clicks. The conventional approach to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to select the site which you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content inside it. You could also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you may deactivate it with a single click via the very same section of your CP.