Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that could arise or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
It won't take more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we provide even if this is the first hosting account that you use, as all of our Linux cloud website hosting feature a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this function only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide you with a simple solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with a couple of mouse clicks. The conventional way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the Internet site that you would like to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You may also use this function for just one folder rather than the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you could deactivate it with just one click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.