Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that may arise or that someone may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
Since our Linux cloud website hosting packages feature a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally only two clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you could also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall add the needed code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside 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 don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your consent, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only have to select the site that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be created straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.