Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that could develop or that somebody could be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink security feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only have to select the Internet site which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be set up directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.