Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, 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 enable hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account which you use, as all our Linux shared web hosting come with a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature we offer. While the typical way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall simply have to pick the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even when you have never used any hosting service before. You can deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.