Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may arise or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet 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 wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with several clicks. The standard way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the site which you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content within it. You may also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you may disable it with one mouse click from the same section of your CP.