Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links straight to your Internet site. This way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that can develop or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may 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 Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud plans and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click 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 authorization, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will simply have to select the site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as simple - you will only need to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.