Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links straight to your site. That way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that could appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all hosting plans we offer and could be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the Internet sites which are protected in the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - return to the same section, check the box next to the particular site and then press the Delete button.