Hotlinking is a widely accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. To put it differently, if you develop a website, someone else may want to use the images that you have and rather than downloading them from your website and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your website. This way, every time a visitor opens their website, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, in addition to the copyright problems that could develop or that someone can be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare occasions, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this type of situations, you may enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the conventional way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you shall only need to select the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any problems even if you have never used any hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.