Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't take more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we provide even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, as all our Linux hosting feature a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site that you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content in it. You could also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you can disable it with just one mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.