Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links to your site. In this 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 issues which could develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the 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 good to go. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with such matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature we offer. While the conventional way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll only need to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.