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 instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Because our Linux cloud website hosting feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party sites with literally only 2 clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the needed location and will include the needed code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so that you can disable this service for any 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 somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is as simple - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the particular website and then press the Delete button.