NTC Hosting Blog

A few important services to mind when choosing your host – SSL Generator, Hotlink Protection, .htaccess Generator

If you are now working on the project for your new website, or have left that job to a specialist, mind to take into consideration the fact that your site will be launched into an unstable, vulnerable environment and hence take all measures to ensure its security online. Most of the services protecting your site against any possible treats on the web must be included in the portfolio of your hosting provider. Some of the most popular and important of them include the SSL Certificate Generator, the Hotlink Protection tool and the .htaccess Generator.

Why you need an SSL Certificate Generator

If you are planning to run an e-commerce store and process payments online, then the matter of security must be your priority care. To ensure a risk-free billing process, where a transmission of sensitive customer information (address, birth date, license/ ID/credit card numbers) takes place, you will have to set up an SSL certificate for your website, or at least for your order page. With an SSL certificate installed on your site, all the sensitive data will be transferred over a secure connection and protected from any act of online abuse. Doing this can be really easy if your hosting provider offers an SSL certificate generator tool, included in their packages or available as an upgrade.

The SSL generator will help you get an authenticated certificate for your site signed by a special trusted Certificate Authority. This will create a trustworthy image of your e-store, log-in or order page, etc. and will guarantee the credibility of your brand in the eyes of your customers and site visitors. You can recognize an SSL site by the ‘S’ letter added to the http:// protocol at the beginning of its web address (e.g. https://www.ntchosting.com/order/). If you use Internet Explorer, you should look for the closed yellow lock icon on the status bar, right next to the Internet globe icon. If your host allows you to have SSL secured websites, mind to check whether they support WWW-renowned Secure Certificates and software, so you can get a high-level protection.

Why you need a Hotlink Protection

Hotlinking is another bad practice you must definitely protect your site from, especially if your site is multi-media rich and has many images on its pages. This practice represents a form of a traffic and intellectual property theft. It occurs when someone makes a direct linking to your website’s images from their website with the sole purpose of using them without making any effort and by using your traffic resources.

To solve this potential serious problem, you will need to have Hotlink Protection enabled for your sites by your host. The hotlink protection service, usually included at no price in the hosting package, will guarantee that no one will be able to steal your traffic resources by directly linking to your files and forcing you to pay their website’s bills.

Why you need an .htaccess generator

Although your site is expected to be open to all users online, sometimes you may decide to limit the access to its pages (to certain pages or all of them) and thus protect its sensitive contents from any potential abuses. This is where you need to make use of a password protection service. When choosing your host, mind to check whether a Password Protected directories option or an .htaccess generator is included in the offered packages. With a quality, easy-to-use .htaccess Generator at hand you will be able to authorize specific users and user groups to browse your website and will feel safe for its contents and accessibility round-the-clock. An .htaccess generator tool will also allow you to redirect your web pages to other pages and specify additional MIME types. You can even set Hotlink Protection for your website’s multimedia files.

Well, just a small part of the useful tools and services for protecting your site online have been covered for you in this post. To learn more about each of them, just check its matching article in the Hosting section of our NTC Hosting encyclopedia. Mind to drop in at our blog often for more useful tips about choosing the best hosting environment for your websites.

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