Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, somebody 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 may simply put links directly to your site. This way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which may appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, due to the fact that all our web hosting come with a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.