Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you create a site, someone 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 site, they could simply put links directly to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to disable the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the Internet sites which are protected in the same section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function we offer. While the common way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll only have to pick the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.