Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that could appear or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
It shall not take more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, as all of our website hosting service include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we've developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.