Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, someone else may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can appear or that somebody can be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Since our Linux website hosting packages provide a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only a couple of clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Additionally, you could also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the exact same section, so you could disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll only have to select the Internet site that should be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.