Hotlinking is a term which describes the addition of images on a particular Internet site through the use of direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your website, they can either save the images and then include them on their Internet site or they may simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Thus, each time a visitor opens Internet site B, site B will steal traffic from your own site A, since the images will load from your hosting account. This process is typically used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you can limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

Due to the fact that our cloud website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to protect your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Additionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall include the necessary code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for each of them with a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than setting up an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to select the Internet site that should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll only need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.