Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links to your website. That way, when 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 problems which may develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing 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 also provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux website hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to select the website which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine if the .htaccess file should be generated directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.