Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links straight to your site. This way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that may present themselves or that someone may 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 very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to 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 manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply have to pick the website which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you want to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.