Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which may arise or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux hosting and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an uncomplicated solution to secure your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with a few clicks. The common way for you to activate server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the website which you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content inside it. You can even use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you could disable it with one click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.