Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that can develop or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all web hosting packages we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the sites which are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.