Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links straight to your site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that can appear or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this type of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites which are protected within the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is as effortless - return to the same section, check the box alongside the given site and then press the Delete button.