Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that may arise or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our cloud hosting plans and the only two things that you will have 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 will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to exactly the 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 our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally simple - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific site and then press the Delete button.