Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links straight to your site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which could present themselves or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There is a method for preventing 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 additionally provide a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our cloud hosting plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we've created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is as simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.