Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux web hosting plans and the only 2 things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to 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 personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with a few mouse clicks. The usual way to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a few directives in it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the website which you need to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content in it. You could also use this feature for only one folder instead of the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you can disable it with a single mouse click from the same section of your Control Panel.