Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links straight to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can arise or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared website hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is as simple - get back to the very same section, check the box alongside the given website and then click on the Delete button.