Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they could simply put links to your Internet site. In this way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which can present themselves or that someone 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 could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in 2 easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this kind of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all of the websites that are protected within the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply need to pick the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be generated straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.