Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may 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, let alone the copyright issues that could develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not require more than a number of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature that we offer even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, because all our Linux website hosting feature a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this function only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given website and then press the Delete button.