Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It won't take more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, as all of our website hosting come with a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it has the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this function only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function we offer. While the common way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you'll only have to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.