Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which can arise or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
It won't take more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function that we provide even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, since all of our cloud hosting packages come with a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this feature only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a really simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will simply need to choose the site that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.