Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links directly to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that could develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds 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 website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Since our shared website hosting come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will add the required code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

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 approval, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the regular way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.