Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links straight to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may arise or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux shared packages feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from showing on third-party websites with literally just 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll just have to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Additionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall add the required code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the exact 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 have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is as easy - go back to the same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.