Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links straight to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which could present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our website hosting and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to return to the 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 find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - return to the same section, check the box beside the given website and then press the Delete button.