Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links to your website. This way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which may develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting plans we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or in a subfolder and you'll be good to go. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection eventually, you can see all of the websites that are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer a simple solution to secure your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The common technique to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the website that you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content inside it. You can even use this option for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with one mouse click through the very same section of your CP.