Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may present themselves or that somebody could be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting packages we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all the Internet sites which are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the very same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.