Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links straight to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet 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 can permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our hosting and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside 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 find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally easy - go back to the same section, check the box next to the particular website and then click on the Delete button.