Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could develop or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than a few clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we provide even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, as all our shared services come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this service only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we provide. While the regular method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you shall only need to select the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the required file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no issues even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.