Hotlinking Protection
What's the goal of hotlink protection? How does it function and when is it useful to allow it?
Hotlinking is a term which represents the inclusion of images on a given Internet site through the use of direct links. In case you have website A, for example, and an individual creates site B and wishes to add a few images from your Internet site, they are able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply place links on their Internet site to the images on yours. Subsequently, each time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, since the images will load directly from your hosting account. This technique is oftentimes used for documents and other types of files also. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own website hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
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Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a simple way of 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 provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our
cloud web hosting plans and the only 2 things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
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Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you start a
semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function we offer you. While the regular technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can do this automatically and you will only need to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should set up the needed file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even in case you have never used any hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.