Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, someone 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 can simply put links straight to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that can present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your website. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud web hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be turned on in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all of the websites that are protected within the very 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 us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you enable this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - return to the exact same section, check the box next to the particular website and then click on the Delete button.