Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they may simply put links to your website. This way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can appear or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
It won't take more than a number of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function which we offer even if this is the first web hosting account which you use, since all our website hosting include a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this function only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you could easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature we offer you. While the common method of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you will only have to choose the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.