Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is as easy - return to exactly the same section, check the box next to the given website and then click on the Delete button.