Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues which can present themselves or that somebody can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared website hosting plans we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the Internet sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer. While the typical technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should create the required file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.