Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links straight to your website. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

Since our cloud hosting provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from showing on third-party websites with literally only two mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Furthermore, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the required code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the exact same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally simple - get back to the same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then press the Delete button.