Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, 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 to your site. In this way, when 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 present themselves or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to 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 notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - get back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.