Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which may arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with this type of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to disable the protection eventually, you could see all the Internet sites which are protected in the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is as easy - get back to the very same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then press the Delete button.