Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a site, some other person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, when a visitor opens their website, the images shall be loaded from your account, consequently stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright issues that can develop or that someone may be trying to trick people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the exact same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could permit hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only two things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide you with a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the website which you want to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the essential content within it. You could also use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you can disable it with a single mouse click through the exact same section of your CP.