Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links directly to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that can present themselves or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in 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 can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all website hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection can be activated in 2 basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should create the .htaccess file within the main folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any computer programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you would like to remove the protection eventually, you could see all of the websites which are protected in the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function we offer you. While the typical method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you'll only need to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.