Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, another 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 may simply put links to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If needed, you will also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - go back to the very same section, check the box alongside the given website and then press the Delete button.