Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links straight to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared service and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the regular method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you will only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.