Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a website, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not require more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature we provide even if this is the first website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our Linux shared hosting come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only need to select the site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be created straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.