Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your website. In this way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, as all our Linux shared website hosting include a simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this function only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature which we provide. While the standard technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only have to select the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.