Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may arise or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux hosting and the only two things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
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 can use the security tool we've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to activate the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.