Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, some other person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your website. That way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
As our cloud website hosting provide a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will add the required code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you shall also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then press the Delete button.