Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they could simply put links directly to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may develop or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just 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
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as easy - get back to the exact same section, check the box beside the given site and then click on the Delete button.