Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links straight to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which can develop or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There is a way of avoiding 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 helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared website hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll need 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 will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily enable the hotlink security function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to select the Internet site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be generated straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, when you would like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.