Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term 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 website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links straight to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could present themselves or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

Since our Linux web hosting provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will include the necessary code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.