Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting package deals we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to enable the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as easy - return to the same section, check the box next to the given site and then press the Delete button.