Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which can present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you can activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to disable the protection at some time, you will be able to see all of the sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you'll only need to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.