Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links straight to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that can appear or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature we offer you even if this is the 1st hosting account you use, as all our shared website hosting plans feature a simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it offers the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this service only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The usual approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the website that you intend to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content in it. You can also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you may deactivate it with a single mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.