Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, 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 own website, they may simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, each time 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 problems that may arise or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security function we provide even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, as all of our Linux shared hosting feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the very same intuitive point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this function only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only have to select the Internet site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be created directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.