Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links directly to your Internet site. In this way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright issues which can appear or that someone may be trying to trick people into believing that they're in fact on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared website hosting services and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool which we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is just as simple - get back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.