Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, somebody else 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 to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could arise or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared services and the only 2 things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will simply need to select the website that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.