Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links directly to your website. In this way, when 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 which could appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux web hosting packages and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to return to 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 create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature we provide. While the conventional way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you will only need to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.