Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your website. This way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which could arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, 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 could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It will not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature that we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, as all of our Linux shared website hosting packages come with a simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this feature only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to enable the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is as simple - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.