Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that could present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

As our Linux website hosting come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally just 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the required code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as effortless - return to the very same section, check the box beside the given site and then press the Delete button.