Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop an Internet site, somebody else may want to use the images you have and instead of downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they can simply put links directly to your website. That way, when a visitor opens their Internet site, the images shall be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, along with the copyright problems that can develop or that somebody can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are in fact on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other kinds of files may also be linked in the very same way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not require more than several clicks to switch on the hotlink security function that we offer even if this is the 1st hosting account that you use, since all our Linux shared hosting feature a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this service only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function we offer. While the common method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can do this automatically and you will only need to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.