Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, 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 website, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared packages and the only two things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is as simple - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific website and then click on the Delete button.