Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using 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 shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You'll only have to visit 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 elementary as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is as easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the given site and then click on the Delete button.