Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can appear or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the Internet sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is as easy - return to the very same section, check the box next to the specific site and then click on the Delete button.