Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you build an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they can simply put links directly to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues that may develop or that somebody could be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It will not take more than a number of clicks to switch on the hotlink security function we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux shared website hosting include a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this feature only for a particular Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your whole content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with just a few clicks. The standard approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find within the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the website which you would like to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the necessary content inside it. You could also use this option for just one folder instead of the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could deactivate it with a single mouse click via the same exact section of your CP.