Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your website. In this way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems that can develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website 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 also offer a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared website hosting plans and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide an uncomplicated solution to protect your content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with several clicks. The standard approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the Internet site which you would like to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content within it. You can also use this function for just one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could deactivate it with a single click via the same section of your Control Panel.