Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that can develop or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our shared web hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will simply have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional way to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the website that you intend to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content in it. You can even use this option for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one click through the exact same section of your CP.