Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, somebody else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which may present themselves or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our cloud website hosting plans and the only two things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the very same section, check the box beside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.