Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links straight to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that may develop or that someone could be trying to trick people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux shared website hosting and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just need to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide a simple solution to shield your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The usual technique to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the Internet site which you intend to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content within it. You can even use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you can disable it with one mouse click via the same section of your CP.