Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which may develop or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet 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 such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting plans which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with just a few clicks. The common way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the site that you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content in it. You may also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with a single click from the very same section of your Control Panel.