Hotlinking is an expression which represents the addition of images on a particular website via direct links. If you have site A, for instance, and a person creates site B and wants to add a few images from your site, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own Internet site A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This method is usually used for documents and other types of files as well. If you wish to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It won't require more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, because all of our web hosting plans come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this feature only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing 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 may use the security tool which we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.