Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links to your website. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which could 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 kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not require more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function which we offer you even if this is the 1st web hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our Linux shared hosting come with a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it features the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you will be able to 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 start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the regular method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which is able to execute this automatically and you shall only need to select the website in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.