Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links straight to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that could arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Since our shared hosting plans come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Furthermore, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will include the needed code within it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the standard method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.