Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could present themselves or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Because our cloud hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will just have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will include the needed code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.