Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet expression for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you build a site, another person may want to use the images which you have and rather than downloading them from your Internet site and then uploading them to their own Internet site, they may simply put links to your Internet site. 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 issues that may present themselves or that someone could be trying to trick people into thinking that they are actually on your Internet site. In rare situations, documents and other kinds of files could also be linked in the very same way. To stop this from happening and to avoid this kind of situations, you could enable hotlink protection for your site.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily activate the hotlink security function, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only have to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.