Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that can develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any coding capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites that are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply need to choose the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be generated directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.