Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which could arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to pick the site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.