Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that may develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, as all of our Linux shared hosting include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the common way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you'll only need to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the required file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.