Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links directly to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that could present themselves or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs 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 personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your real images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is just as simple - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.