Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build a site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links directly to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can appear or that someone can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We offer an effective solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The usual way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to pick the Internet site that you need to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content inside it. You can even use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you'll be able to disable it with just one click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.