Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which can arise or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our website hosting and the only two things which you will have 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 personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as easy - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.