Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links to your Internet site. That way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that could appear or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It will not take more than a number of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, as all of our Linux cloud web hosting packages feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally simple - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the given site and then click on the Delete button.