Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. Basically, if you build an Internet site, another person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their site, they could simply put links directly to your website. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems which could develop or that someone can be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, as there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all of the Internet sites which are protected inside the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will only have to pick the website which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.