Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only have to pick the Internet site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as simple - you will simply need to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.