Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't require more than a few mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function which we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, since all of our hosting service come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact easy-to-use 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 that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function we offer you. While the common method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you will only need to pick the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.