Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that can develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, because all of our Linux web hosting come with a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this service only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.