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

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It shall not take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the 1st hosting account which you use, since all of our shared hosting plans include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function which we offer. While the regular method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you'll simply have to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.