Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may appear or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Because our shared website hosting plans come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall add the necessary code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you can easily 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 another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is as easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given website and then click on the Delete button.