Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your website. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling 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 execute this automatically and you shall simply have to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.