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

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all hosting plans we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all the websites which are protected in the same exact 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 shield your content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with just a few clicks. The standard way for you to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the site which you would like to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content in it. You can even use this feature for just one folder instead of the entire website - you just need 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 deactivate it with just one click via the same section of your Control Panel.