Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can 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 website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature that we offer even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, as all our shared hosting service feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
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 we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the particular website and then press the Delete button.