Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a particular site through direct links. If you have website A, for instance, and somebody creates website B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Consequently, whenever a visitor opens website B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, as the images will load straight from your hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you would like to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature we offer even if this is the very first web hosting account which you use, since all of our shared hosting feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it features the same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this feature only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside 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 notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the given site and then click on the Delete button.