Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud plans and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the conventional method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will only have to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the required file within the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.