Hotlinking Protection
What's the objective of hotlink protection? How does it work and when is it recommended to enable it?
Hotlinking is a term which refers to the addition of images on a particular Internet site through direct links. If you have website A, for example, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a few images from your website, they could either save the images and then add them on their website or they can simply put links on their site to the images on yours. As a result, every time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load from your website hosting account. This approach is oftentimes used for documents and other kinds of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own web hosting account’s resources, you are able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their Internet sites.
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Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in 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 a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our
Linux shared hosting services and the only two things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
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Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a
semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature just for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as easy - return to the very same section, check the box next to the particular site and then click on the Delete button.