Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, whenever 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 issues which may arise or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

Due to the fact that our Linux hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally just two mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the necessary code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the exact same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.