Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you build a website, another person may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their website, they may simply put links to your Internet site. That way, when a visitor opens their site, the images shall be loaded from your account, hence stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems that can arise or that somebody may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they're in fact on your Internet site. In rare occasions, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you can enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come back to 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 our company and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is as effortless - return to the same section, check the box next to the given site and then press the Delete button.