Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links to your website. That way, every time a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that can develop or that somebody could be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files may also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There is a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our website hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your real images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.