Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that could develop or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

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. Once you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.