Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a 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 own website, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

As our Linux shared hosting packages include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only two mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. In addition, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall add the required code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally simple - get back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given site and then click on the Delete button.