Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your site. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which may arise or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
It shall not take more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, because all our Linux web hosting feature a rather 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 advanced Hepsia CP, so it features the very same intuitive 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 select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this feature only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to turn off 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 us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as simple - get back to the same section, check the box beside the specific website and then press the Delete button.