Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you develop a website, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links straight to your website. In this way, when a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, thus stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright problems which could appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want others to use your images on their sites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll only have to pick the Internet site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can determine if the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll only need to mark the checkbox beside the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.