Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that can present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared website hosting plans and the only two things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.