Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that could arise or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all shared web hosting package deals that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in two simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.