Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may arise or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Because our cloud website hosting plans include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will add the required code within it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

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 may use the security tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific site and then press the Delete button.