Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall 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 somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of clicks to enable the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, because all our shared website hosting feature a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it features the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this feature only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we provide. While the standard method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you shall simply have to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.