Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links to your website. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could present themselves or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It shall not take more than several clicks to enable the hotlink security function we offer even if this is the 1st hosting account that you use, as all our shared hosting include a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we provide. While the regular technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.