Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any coding expertise or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer an uncomplicated solution to protect your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The conventional way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the website that you intend to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content in it. You could also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be switched on, you can deactivate it with one mouse click from the very same section of your Control Panel.