Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links to your website. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may present themselves or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud web hosting services and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only need to select the website that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.