Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply need to choose the site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.