Hotlinking Protection
What's the purpose of hotlink protection? How does it function and in which cases is it recommended to allow it?
Hotlinking is a largely accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. Quite simply, if you create an Internet site, another person may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links directly to your website. That way, each time a visitor opens their website, 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 could arise or that someone can be trying to trick people into believing that they're actually on your Internet site. In rare instances, documents and other sorts of files could also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you can permit hotlink protection for your site.
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Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our
Linux shared hosting and the only two things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be enabled 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 choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
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Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a
semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. As soon as you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is as effortless - return to the exact same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.