Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our website hosting feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall include the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your real images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally easy - return to the same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.