Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links straight to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may appear or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

As our Linux shared hosting provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the needed code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to choose the site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be set up straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.