Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

Because our Linux web hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Additionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall include the necessary code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll only have to choose the website which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.