Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links straight to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which may arise or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
It won't take more than several clicks to switch on the hotlink security function which we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account which you use, since all of our Linux hosting packages include a rather 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 innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this feature only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the conventional method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.