Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which can appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink security function which we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, because all of our shared web hosting packages come with a simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same intuitive point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your real images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the given site and then click on the Delete button.