Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create an Internet site, someone else may want to use the images that you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're actually on your site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you may permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Due to the fact that our Linux website hosting come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this type of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Furthermore, you could also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will include the needed code inside it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in exactly the same section, so you may disable this service for each of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - return to the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then press the Delete button.