Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that may present themselves or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files can 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 Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

Since our shared hosting service feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Furthermore, you could also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will include the required code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - return to the same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.