Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a site, 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 website, they may simply put links directly to your site. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues that may develop or that someone could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all web hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection can be activated in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any coding skills or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all the websites which are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature which we offer. While the typical way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall only need to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.