Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which can appear or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Since our Linux shared hosting feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the required code within it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the common way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you'll simply have to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.