Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links straight to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may appear or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Due to the fact that our Linux shared hosting packages provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to shield your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Additionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall include the necessary code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - get back to the exact same section, check the box next to the particular Internet site and then click on the Delete button.