Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links straight to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may appear or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our hosting and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your consent, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.