Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they could simply put links directly to your Internet site. That way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that can arise or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be enabled in two easy steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with such matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection eventually, you can see all the websites that are protected inside the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file manually in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only need to select the site which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be set up straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.