Hotlinking is an expression which describes the inclusion of images on a given Internet site using direct links. If you have website A, for example, and a person creates website B and wants to include a number of images from your site, they could either save the images and then include them on their site or they could simply put links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, whenever a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load straight from your hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It shall not require more than several clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we provide even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, since all our web hosting come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this feature only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool which we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your real images. You will only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - return to the very same section, check the box next to the particular website and then press the Delete button.