Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which could arise 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 may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared website hosting packages we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be turned on in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't require any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply need to choose the website that should be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.