Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a website, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your website. This way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues that can appear or that someone could be trying to deceive people into believing that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your Internet site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
As our shared hosting service come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll just have to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will add the required code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you shall also have the option to activate the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as simple - go back to the very same section, check the box alongside the given site and then click on the Delete button.