Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create a site, somebody else may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your site. That way, each time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, let alone the copyright issues which can appear or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your Internet site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you do not have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared website hosting package deals that we offer and could be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't need any computer programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you'd like to disable the protection at some time, you can see all the sites which are protected within the exact same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site rather than your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to enable the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as effortless - get back to the very same section, check the box next to the particular website and then click on the Delete button.