Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links straight to your Internet site. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that could present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files could 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 site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our shared hosting service and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The common way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia CP, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to select the website which you need to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the required content in it. You can also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you may disable it with one click through the exact same section of your CP.