Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which may arise or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our cloud web hosting plans and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to 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 another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature which we offer you. While the typical method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.