Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and instead of downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their site, they may simply put links to your site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which can develop or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid such situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
As our Linux shared web hosting services include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.