Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that could develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
Since our hosting include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will include the required code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your actual images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is as simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.