Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create 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 website, they may simply put links straight to your site. That way, whenever a visitor opens their Internet site, the images will be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright issues which can present themselves or that somebody may be trying to trick people into thinking that they are in fact on your site. In rare instances, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your website.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared web hosting and the only two things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You'll only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to enable the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is as easy - return to the very same section, check the box next to the specific website and then press the Delete button.