Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a website, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which could present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
As our shared website hosting plans provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will add the needed code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to choose the site which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.