Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links straight to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which could present themselves or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Since our Linux hosting provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a 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 that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is as easy - return to the very same section, check the box next to the given site and then click on the Delete button.