Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links straight to your site. In this way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which can appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
It shall not take more than a couple of clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we provide even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux web hosting come with a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file yourself within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll only have to choose the website that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.