Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you develop a site, someone else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own site, they could simply put links directly to your site. This way, each time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which may present themselves or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other types of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
Because our shared web hosting plans provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from showing on third-party websites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and will include the needed code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide a simple solution to secure your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the site that you would like to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content inside it. You could also use this function for just one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be enabled, you may deactivate it with one click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.