Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that may develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected inside the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will only have to select the site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.