Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links straight to your website. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may appear or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of clicks to enable the hotlink security feature we offer even if this is the first hosting account which you use, because all of our hosting come with a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the exact same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to enable the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.