Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may appear or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It shall not take more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function which we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our Linux shared website hosting feature a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your approval, you may easily enable the hotlink protection function, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you will simply need to pick the site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file will be generated straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to enable the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.