Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may appear or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security function that we provide even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, because all our cloud plans include a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it offers the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this function only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function that we provide. While the regular way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily perform this automatically and you shall only need to pick the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no issues even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.