Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links straight to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that can present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our website hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - get back to the same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.