Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links straight to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may 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 Hosting

It shall not take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we offer even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, since all of our Linux hosting service come with a 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 advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable 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 will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

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 should use the security tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.