Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they can simply put links to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

As our cloud web hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will include the necessary code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with a click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - go back to the very same section, check the box next to the particular website and then press the Delete button.