Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may develop or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can 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 website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared hosting plans and the only two things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with several clicks. The standard approach to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the website that you intend to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content in it. You could also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be active, you may disable it with a single mouse click through the very same section of your Control Panel.