Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links directly to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could appear or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not require more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, because all of our shared hosting include a very simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it features the same intuitive point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this feature only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.