Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet phrase for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you create a website, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own site, they can simply put links directly to your Internet site. This way, whenever a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that may develop or that somebody could be trying to deceive people into believing that they're actually on your site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files can also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could activate hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our cloud service and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to return 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
Our company offers an effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The standard way to activate server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to choose the site that you would like to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content in it. You could also use this function for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you could deactivate it with just one click from the very same section of your Control Panel.