Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links to your website. In this way, when 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 problems that may arise or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common method to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will simply have to choose the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.