Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links directly to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could present themselves or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may 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 Website Hosting

It won't take more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the 1st hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux website hosting packages come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this feature only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll only have to pick the site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be created straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.