Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting services and the only two things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just need to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the typical way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you'll only have to select the website in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.