Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links to your website. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can arise or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all shared website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or within a subfolder and you shall be ready. You don't require any coding skills or any experience with this type of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some point, you can see all the websites that are protected inside the same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer an effective solution to protect your content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The common way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to choose the site that you want to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content in it. You can even use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to deactivate it with one mouse click from the same exact section of your Control Panel.