Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they can 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, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - return to the very same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.