Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your site. That way, every time a visitor opens their site, 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 could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be enabled in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be all set. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with such matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the Internet sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each 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 may use the security tool we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - return to the same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.