Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your site. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that could present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - return to the very same section, check the box next to the particular site and then click on the Delete button.