Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links to your website. This way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that can develop or that somebody could be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

Because our web hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you do not have much experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will include the necessary code in it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the very same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we provide. While the regular technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.