Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links straight to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could arise or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

Since our shared web hosting plans come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally just a couple of clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you can also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.

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 should use the security tool which we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific site and then press the Delete button.