Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term 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 which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight 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, not to mention the copyright issues that can develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

Since our web hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally just 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will include the necessary code inside it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature which we offer. While the conventional way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you shall only need to pick the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without difficulties even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.