Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a 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 site, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that could appear or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It shall not take more than several clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, because all our shared website hosting plans come with a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply have to choose the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.