Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which could present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
Because our cloud website hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and will add the required code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink security function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to select the site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.