Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which may develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our hosting services and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature we offer. While the standard technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you shall only have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You can turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.