Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that could appear or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you'll be ready. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only need to select the site that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.