Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you create a website, someone else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
It will not require more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink protection function we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, because all of our cloud website hosting plans include a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the exact same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this feature only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply have to select the site which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be generated directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.