Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create 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 site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting package deals we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected in the very same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool which we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.