Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they can simply put links directly to your website. In this way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems which may present themselves or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a number of clicks to switch on the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux shared packages feature a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only need to choose the website which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.